unity-design team mailing list archive

[Jarlath Reidy <jarlathreidy@xxxxxxxxx>]

When I'm teaching people how to use computers - I tell them to think of the
right button as the 'menu button' (the word *context* is off-putting to
many).

This drastically improves their ability to interact with the desktop and
predict what behaviour is expected of them. It makes sense to them and it's
consistent; left button to 'activate' things, right to 'operate'. They
generally learn faster then as operations like copy / paste become
discoverable. *(The only thing that catches them out is when to single-click
and when to double-click, but explaining the difference between the
file-manager, desktop, web-browser and toolbars etc comes later. )*

Having a different menu for each button seems to fall between two lines of
thinking and personally, I get caught out all the time by the current setup
- I can't remember which button to click to get the menu I want because to
me there is no sense to it. I can't make a distinction between the two menus
without getting very anal and that's not a good thing for users in general I
believe, assuming I'm not very alone of course.