UX Guidelines — Smashing Magazine

We often rely on sticky headlines to draw the user’s attention to critical features or calls to action. Think sidebar navigation, CTAs, sticky headers and footers, “fixed” rows or columns in tables, and floating buttons. We’ve already looked at mobile navigation patterns Smart interface design patternsbut sticky menus deserve a closer look.

As users scroll, a sticky menu always remains in view. And usually this is considered a good feature, especially if the menus are used frequently and especially if we want to speed up navigation.

However, sticky menus also have some disadvantages. In his recent article on Sticky menus are problematic, and what to do instead, Adam Silver discusses some common usability issues of sticky menus—and how to fix them. Let’s take a closer look.

How do we decide whether a menu should be sticky or not? It depends on the primary job of a page. If it’s designed to primarily convey information and we don’t expect a lot of navigation, then sticky menus aren’t very useful.

However, if we expect users to navigate a lot between different views on a page and stay on the page while doing so – as is often the case on long landing pages, product pages and filters – then have access to navigation, AZ or tabs can be very useful.

Also when users compare features in a data table, sticky headers help them verify...