Products · Pattern or everyday thing
Dropdown menus
Raised as a usability problem by 15 people on Hacker News over 14 years (2012–2025), in 14 threads.
No issue was raised by at least 3 people in 3 threads this year.
No issue was raised by at least 3 people in 3 threads in the last 5 years.
Every issue, all time, most people first
Long dropdown lists lack keyboard search, forcing scrollingUnreviewed
20122026- Long dropdown lists lack keyboard search, forcing tedious scrolling to find an option2025-02-04
- Drop-down with thousands of entries shows only a tiny subset, scrolling one item at a time2022-03-14
- Scrolling through more than five items in a drop-down is annoying2020-08-03
Dropdowns hide options, requiring mouse movement to find themUnreviewed
20122026- Dropdowns hide options until clicked, so users must act to see choices2024-03-08
- Hunting through drop-down menus makes the user look away from the document2020-07-10
- Dropdowns hide information and require mouse movement to find and reveal options2019-12-28
Unreviewed issues were grouped by machine: Claude Haiku labelled each comment as a usability complaint, named what it's about and summed up the problem in a line, and a small model grouped similar problems. Nobody has checked them by hand. Expect mistakes.
The newest 15 complaints
- Long dropdown lists lack keyboard search, forcing tedious scrolling to find an option2025-02-04
- Dropdowns hide options until clicked, so users must act to see choices2024-03-08
- Drop-down with thousands of entries shows only a tiny subset, scrolling one item at a time2022-03-14
- Suggestions hijack attention and make the user forget what they were doing2021-06-01
- Scrolling through more than five items in a drop-down is annoying2020-08-03
- Hunting through drop-down menus makes the user look away from the document2020-07-10
- Dropdowns hide information and require mouse movement to find and reveal options2019-12-28
- Long menus are slow to scroll and find items in, slower than typing2019-12-17
- Type-ahead search is undiscoverable and users can't see what they're typing2019-08-19
- Dropdown boxes are unintuitive for people who did not grow up with them2018-07-16
- Drop-down menus are cited as a design failure that makes interfaces hard to use2016-01-02
- Many users don't know dropdowns can be operated by keyboard, so they use the mouse2015-07-20
- Dropdown menus are hard to use, especially on mobile or touch devices2015-07-20
- Menus open with a delay and need precise mouse movement to stay open2013-03-06
- Dropdowns are not intuitive and become unusable with large amounts of data2012-06-15