Something I've noticed after a few years of using the internet: Everything becomes exponentially more of a pain to access for each click it takes to reach it. You could even call it rule #1 of Clyde's Awesome Rulebook of Interface Design Rules and Guidelines That Should Be Taken As Seriously As Rules.
Two other noteworthy things that were/became a pain to access:
- Google Wave: You had two choices here, dig through a menu to find it or type in "wave.google.com"
- This resulted in significantly fewer people even knowing about the service.
- Google then ceased development on a service because nobody was using it, which was because Google was essentially hiding it.
- Facebook's logout button
- Seriously, Facebook. What brilliant person thought it was a good idea to hide the logout button in a menu? The whole idea of having a drop-down menu is so you can hide some features and make the space less cluttered so you can find more important things quicker. Important things such as the logout button. Good job promoting account security there, Facebook.
Moral of the story: Drop-down menus are a shitty artifact of when computer screens had shitty resolution, and should be used sparingly. By sparingly, I mean about as sparingly as you should spread arsenic on a piece of toast.
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