Has anyone ever tried making the drop-downs appear like a carousel? I have a horizontal menu with a few drop downs. I thought it would be cool to make the drop-downs cycle automatically with a automatic hover triggers after a certain delay.
Any thoughts?
Personally I think it would be a bit like wack-a-mole if dropdowns started auto-triggering on a site. I'd find it distracting and then frustrating if I saw a section I was interested in and wanted to click it, only to have it disappear and another menu appear.
Carousel style navigation works well with single choices on each iteration. If there are multiple choices on each iteration (i.e. a dropdown) it will become too much for your users.
There's a jQuery plugin called jCarousel that does just that.
Here is a demo that might be similar to what you've described:
http://sorgalla.com/projects/jcarousel/examples/static_vertical.html