Pop-up menus: (was Findings and thoughts)

[thaynes ca ibm com]

> A final question. Has anyone looked at the trade-off between a menu bar
vs. a
> pop-up menu? The menu bar provides few (if any) advantages by Fitts' Law
and a
> button3 pop-up menu would be at a magic point. It would be a 'hidden
feature', but
> one that would be quickly learned if used by all apps; it could be
'unhidden'
> by providing an info dialog in the initial run of the app. An immediately
> apparent problem would be the lengthening of context sensitive menus and
that the
> contents of the menu would change. The GIMP and Dia already have this to
some extent,
> though they retain the menubar.

For me, there is no comparison - pop-up menus are superior. Click a mouse
button
and go - no fishing for menu bars at the top of the screen, no having to
widen
the window to see the right-hand end of the menu bar, and
context-sensitivite
menus mean that in a well-designed application you always have a menu with
the
appropriate entries ready and waiting. Having been exposed to Risc OS and
got
used to this system, it becomes really frustrating to have to go hit some
menu bar to get to a feature. Of course the down-side to this is that the
complete novice user gets no visible options for their new document unless
there
is a toolbar (yet another UI-element which has been heavily abused by
having too
many buttons of miniscule size), so it is probably better to have this as a
configurable option at the window manager level: let the user decide
whether
there is a menu bar or not, and have a designated mouse button to produce a
pop-up menu under the current mouse position if there is no menu bar.

Take a look at the ROX project if you want to get a feel for how RiscOS
works -
this uses a heavily customized and extended Enlightenment theme to
reproduce most
of the essential elements, down to the drag-and-drop save protocol.

http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~tal197/rox.php3

Cheers,

Toby Haynes
tel: (416) 448-4330
email: thaynes@ca.ibm.com