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Message #05891
Re: Thoughts on Unity design
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.
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