Are Dropdowns Annoying?

[flareuser1]

Has anyone had user feedback about the use of dropdowns on a topic? For example, say you have 10 fields to describe, and all that content makes for a very long page that users have to scroll through. To reduce the page length, you put the description of each field into a dropdown. The heading for the dropdown would be the name of the field.

This creates a shorter help page, but I'm wondering if it's annoying for users to have to click through dropdowns to view field descriptions. The toolbar on each of my help pages does have an Expand All icon, so that may be helpful. But, I'm wondering if anyone has done away with or reduced their use of dropdowns because it created a frustrating user experience.

Thank you in advance for any thoughts on this!

[Chicago_HPT]

Personally, I would find it annoying to have every field as a dropdown, but I do feel the same as you that the page can become extra long otherwise. I tend to put all of the field descriptions in a single dropdown. My current project contains a lot of reports that display in a grid. Each field is a column of the grid, so the clickable dropdown heading is "View column descriptions." Another method might be to make logical groups so you have a couple of dropdowns that contain several related fields each, if that makes sense.

Cheers,
-jeff

[flareuser1]

Thank you for the suggestions, Jeff! Those are good ideas. I'll try out grouping to reduce the number of dropdowns and see how that looks.

[Beaver]

I agree with Jeff

Note:
When using a drop down, with
a table (with many columns), it does not scale if you view it at a smaller resolution. The second part (right) of the table is then not visible.

[Paul Griffiths]

A related question is "Are Dropdowns Accessible?"

I have no experience with accessibility and would be interested to hear what people think about drop downs and togglers in this regard.