Drop Down Menu Affordances | July 12th, 2008
It seems like drop down menus are moving back towards having down arrows on them.
It seems like in the early days of Web 1.0 people would do all they could to get away from the select box and use all sorts of fancy DHTML menus (remember dynamicdrive.com anyone?). However, these days we are seeing most applications that have drop down menus - while not using the HTML select element - are reverting back to the down arrow visual affordance.
For example, GMail, Zazzle, LinkedIn and Amazon are all using the down arrow on their drop down menus nowadays. This simplification of user interfaces becoming a common theme in the latest web based applications.