>Don’t depend on rollovers

Posted on September 13, 2010

>Look at a site on an iPad, iPhone or in fact any touch device and you will notice the rollovers no longer  work. Yes this is pretty obvious, touch has no hover state, but it means that if you are relying on this to let users know that they can interact with something it’s not going to work on a touch device and you users will become confused and frustrated.

A good example of this is Light box. On a touch device those little arrows that indicate you can click on the left and right of the image no longer appear. So users who have never seen this before don’t know they can interact with the image to see more. Another example is mystery meat navigation, suddenly this becomes impossible to understand and requires wild guessing to navigate.

As more interaction takes place via touch devices we can no longer depend on rollover states to inform users of how they can interact. Sure we can still use them, but just don’t depend on them.