Zooming Rollovers
image menus reveal additional visual details over time
Jonathan Helfman, 2002
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The problem with menus, even image menus, is that they often don't have enough bandwidth to represent the information they link to. Zooming Rollover Menus reveal high-resolution visual details or play dynamic previews of available information without changing the visual context of the original menu. For example, when you roll your cursor over a mosaic of small images the selected one appears to zoom larger and clearer before dissolving away. The size and position of the original image never changes, however -- it remains visible and may be selected at any time.
Shown are three consecutive screen grabs of a Flash Zoom-over prototype. The people's pictures were collected automatically by a program that parses a bookmarks or favorites file, looking for the largest, squarest, most-colorful image on each bookmarked page. In the prototype, when a person's picture is selected the bookmarked web page is loaded in a browser.
