Great post looking into Amazon’s mega-menu dropdown, which shows sub-navigation items to the right of the parent category. Lots of insight and algebra around mouse cursor movement, hover state gotchas and more.
Lately there’s been a lot of talk about considering touch across the board, and while I totally agree with that sentiment, this post demonstrates how efficient hover states really can be.
Which brings to the forefront a very real problem: there’s no way for us to 100% tell if a pointer is being used or not. That’s a serious issue that forces us to compromise our designs to accommodate touch and pointers.