unity-design team mailing list archive

[Jo-Erlend Schinstad <joerlend.schinstad@xxxxxxxxx>]

Please look at this screenshot: http://ubuntuone.com/501RQqrOW1fh89fsIWhx4z

When accessing deep command structures (previously known as menus :)), 
most of the information in HUD is repeated many times. This creates 
unnecessary clutter.

It would be better to display the submenu as a header and then only 
lists the menu items under that header. I'm not a great Gimp artist, so 
I'll use text to illustrate how I think it should be, compared to what 
you see in the screenshot. [more encodings] represents the search field 
with input.

Current:

[more encodings]
View > Character Encodings > More Encodings > User Defined
View > Character Encodings > More Encodings > Unicode (UTF-16)
View > Character Encodings > More Encodings > Middle Eastern
View > Character Encodings > More Encodings > SE & SW Asian
View > Character Encodings > More Encodings > East Asian


My proposal:

[more encodings]
View > Character Encodings > More Encodings (Non-clickable)
        User Defined
        Unicode (UTF-16)
        Middle Eastern
        SE & SW Asian
        East Asian


Of course, this was just a quick example I found in the application I 
was currently using. (Thunderbird) I can imagine scenarios where you 
have much deeper hierarchies. In those cases, the actual command might 
have to be shortened because the path is too long. But the command is 
more important than the path leading to it. I think that needs 
consideration as a pure usability issue.

In any case, I think this would be cleaner than repeating the entire 
path over and over.

Thoughts?

--
Jo-Erlend Schinstad