unity-design team mailing list archive

[Mitja Pagon <mitja.pagon@xxxxxxxxxx>]

Nicely put, to extend on you example, the problem Microsoft faced were not pull down menus themselves, it was rather the fact that Office applications acquired so much functionality, that pull down menus were no longer an optimal way to expose that functionality. 

This "trend" against application menus is based on generalized assumptions based on isolated examples of applications with "alternative" menus, mostly chrome and firefox (ironically both have application menus in OSX AFAIK) and it seems, as you mentioned, like making a change for the sake of change. 

Cheers, 
Mitja 

----- "Kevin Godby" <godbyk@xxxxxxxxx> wrote: 
> Hello, Shane. 
> 
> On Sat, Apr 16, 2011 at 12:15 PM, Shane Fagan 
> <shanepatrickfagan@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote: 
> > We can do it and also learn from microsoft's mistake. Im not saying it 
> > wouldnt be a challenge to make it work but I think we should be 
> > looking to do things like this to make the interface more intelligent. 
> > Menus haven't changed for a long time we should change that. 
> 
> I'm all for making user interfaces more intelligent. However, we 
> shouldn't change pull-down menus merely for the sake of changing 
> pull-down menus. 
> 
> What are the problems with the existing pull-down menu design? What 
> are some potential solutions to those problems? How can we test those 
> solutions to see if they are improvements over the original design? 
> 
> Here's an example: 
> 
> Problem: Users must wade through menu items that they rarely use to 
> get to the menu items they use more frequently (such as Save and 
> Print). 
> 
> Proposed solution: Rearrange the menu items so that the 
> most-frequently used menu items at the top of the menu. Further, we 
> could hide rarely used menu items and reveal them if the user requests 
> it or dwells on the menu for some period of time. 
> 
> Testing the design: Microsoft implemented this design in Office 2000 
> to much fanfare. The problem with the design is that the order of the 
> menu items changed from day to day, so the desired menu item wasn't 
> where it was before, and was therefore *more difficult* to find. 
> Further, the hidden menu items made it much more difficult for people 
> to discover the (less-frequently used) features they were seeking and 
> greatly reduced the discoverability of those features. 
> 
> At this point, you could iterate the design to address the problems 
> found by testing or, if the problems were inherent in the design, go 
> back to the drawing board and come up with a new design. 
> 
> But you should always start with a clear problem statement—otherwise 
> you have no way of knowing whether your 'solution' is an improvement. 
> 
> --Kevin 
> 
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