Re: [Evolution-hackers] spam filtering

[Calum Benson <Calum Benson Sun COM>]

On Thu, 2003-10-02 at 18:34, Anna Marie Dirks wrote:

> It would be really nice to know what logic informed the creators of the
> HIG when they decided this; is this a working memory issue? a muscle
> control issue? just a nice sounding number? 

More of a searching issue than a memory issue really... a looong time
ago I helped do a little study in which we looked at how quickly people
could find things on a fairly-randomly-ordered list which was known to
contain the the thing they were looking for, and performance was shown
to drop off more rapidly if it was longer than about ten items.  

Of course, if the menu's contents are constant (as they are on an
application's menu bar), memory plays into this over time and you can
usually get away with longer ones.  And searching is easier if things
are more strongly grouped too, as they can be on context menus.  But
nonetheless context menus can vary quite a lot depending on where you
happen to click and the current state of the app, so there tends to be a
bit more searching involved than with a regular menu.  

But, basically, it's just a guideline I've carried around and blindly
quoted since then :)

The suggestion not to use submenus on right-click menus is partly an
extension of this, and partly just a fiddliness issue... submenus can be
tricky and time-consuming to navigate at the best of times.  So to me it
just seems logical that you shouldn't force the user to navigate them in
the context of something that, by definition, is supposed to make their
task quicker and easier.

Cheeri,
Calum.

-- 
CALUM BENSON, Usability Engineer       Sun Microsystems Ireland
mailto:calum benson sun com            GNOME Desktop Group
http://ie.sun.com                      +353 1 819 9771

Any opinions are personal and not necessarily those of Sun Microsystems