Question

Is there a way to increase usability of drop down menus for customers such as introducing some delay between it fading out if the user moves their mouse over an area they didn’t mean too, or for wide menus making it easier for the user to get to a 2nd level by maybe calculating angle of mouse movement or making a guess as to the intention of the user so they don’t get frustrated when trying to access the flyout of the 2nd level dropdown and it changes?

Answer 1

There is actually a jquery method called Hover Intent Interval and Hover Intent Timeout. Which does what you are asking, you can set a timeout so if they hover over a menu then hover off it takes lets say 500ms to animate away or vice versa (animate in).

Here is a link for more info, also try doing some googling Im sure there is a better resource:
http://cherne.net/brian/resources/jquery.hoverIntent.html

Another method I have used in the past with megamenus is the user has to CLICK to open/animate the menu then it stays open.