Speed dial

A speed dial is what a floating action button becomes when the screen has more than one action worth promoting. Press it and a small fan of related actions unfolds along one edge, each a mini button with a label beside it, staggered so the group reads as opening rather than as appearing. Choose one and the fan closes again.

It exists because the floating action button has exactly one slot and screens rarely have exactly one important action. The rule of thumb is three to six: fewer than three and the extra press is not worth it, more than six and you have built a menu that happens to be round. Every action in the fan should be the same kind of thing (ways to add something, ways to send something), because the fan has no headings, no grouping, and no room to explain itself. If your six actions need explaining, you want a menu button with a proper menu attached.

The name comes from the telephone, and it survives mostly in React vocabulary. Material 2 documented the pattern, Material 3 dropped it, and Material UI kept both the component and the name, which is why “speed dial” is what people search for and “expanding FAB” is what the design documentation calls it. Do not confuse it with a marking menu, which is also radial but answers a stroke made before it appears, and is a gesture vocabulary rather than a button with children.

The accessibility notes are the usual ones for a floating layer, plus one of its own. Each mini button needs a real label, not just an icon, and the label should be visible rather than only in a tooltip, because the icons in a fan are being read at a glance and half of them will be ambiguous. Opening on hover alone is a mistake on touch and a trap on desktop: open on press, close on choosing, on Escape, or on a press outside.