New "down" arrows on left nav are not sized right

[dbonneville]

The left and right hit target areas of the updated "down" or "open" arrows on the left menu titles are too small. The area to the right is partially taken by the new shadow. The active area of the button is not reflected in the actual graphic.

It would be best to either increase the hit area or redesign the graphic to indicate the difference between hitting the arrow and hitting the blank area of the bar, which serves as another kind of link (the one that reloads the page).

The blank area of the bar activates as soon as you are off of the little arrow, but well before you get to any of the text. It's not clear when or why or where the change from arrow hit area to text hit area occurs.

This is an ambiguous affordance.

The text should remain the target, or a clearly defined button area, but not an ambiguous area that has no delineation between the end of the invisible text area and the arrow.

Also, the arrow appears when hovering over a bar you are currently not viewing, but clicking it when you see it either reloads the page or drops down the javascript windowshade to reveal the submenu without reloading. Again, there are too many ambiguous affordances going on here. A clear graphical indicator to show you are going to expand the menu open what the arrow suggests) is due here.

There are many ways to solve this design issue, too many to suggest, but even a cursory look at this should give the responsible parties some ideas on how to clarify it. Any increased clarity is better than what is there now.

[trepmal]

Assuming I understand the ticket correctly, I think the new flyout menu makes this invalid?

[dbonneville]

Yes, the new flyout made this bug invalid.