EA’s Origin service launched back in June 2011 as an EA-only version of the Steam digital distribution platform. I haven’t had a lot of need to use it until recently, when the Sim City beta launched (which by the way, I am excessively stoked about). When I fired it up this weekend, I recognized a classic usability problem that I really thought we collectively had defeated already: The Diagonal Problem.
Failure is imminent.
As far as I can tell, Jakob Nielsen coined this term back in a 2009 Alertbox article titled “Mega Menus Work Well for Site Navigation“. The problem can occur in any kind of poorly designed hover menu – when you have a small label that displays a big menu on hover, if the mouse ends up temporarily outside the path of the active item, the menu will close.
Here, I recorded a short video of the situation in Origin…
