Re: [Ayatana] Thoughts on Unity design

[Henrik Peytz <henrik.peytz@xxxxxxxxx>]

Just my 0.02$ on Fitts's Law vs. Unity (some, if not all, have already been put forth):

 

I don't think one can, with 100% accuracy, apply Fitts's Law to the Unity-interface. Reason being that Fitts's Law deals with visible, consistent interfaces that do not change. In Unity, when an application is not in focus, the application-menu is not visible, and as such one has to take into account the scenario where there is travel-time required to first bring a given application into focus before accessing the application menu.

 

Next, the Global menu changes on a per-application basis. If one is to use multiple applications in a way that is on par with the regular menuing-scheme, then one has to memorize the menu-layout of each application in order to know where to "throw" the mouse after bringing the application into focus, which is not newbie-friendly. To exemplify this: According to Fitts's Law one of the best menuing-schemes would be a pie-chart kind of deal around the mouse (short-distance, big buttons), but it simply wouldn't work with application-menus since, again, they change on a per-application-basis. If you have ever played Neverwinter Nights you'll know what I'm talking about. Neverwinter Nights has, as a supplement to normal interface buttons) a radial-menu fleshed out quite the way Fitts's Law describes a pie-chart-menu, that appears when the player right-clicks an object in-game. However, this menu, gamers agree, is very bad to game with, for the same reason: the contents of the radial-menu changes depending on which object you're right-clicking in-game (character, box, enemy, etc. even different menus for subclasses of these), and so it is not useful in-game as players do not always have time to read through the menu-options in situations that require snap decisions (being attacked by a monster, for instance). If one were to use this radial-menu in an efficient way, then one would have to memorize all the options for all the monsters, characters, boxes etc., same goes for the Global Menu.