SV: User interface suggestions

["Blad, John Erling" <john erling blad aftenposten no>]

>Perhaps we could have a floating menu/toolbar that has a list of the
>frequently used items, and perhaps another for recently used?  This would

>Tom Musgrove

What if you have an app were you interact with objects? Then you pop up
a menu, assuming you gets actions for the object.. and you get a most used
action from the menubar! This can happend in a file manager.

I've been discussing that problem in length in an other project.. :(

An other speed-up is to post the menu to the last known state if some
constraints
are satisfied. Thast one looks nice but it was really a waste of time if you
gessed
wrong, which we did often. We posted the menu only when the user clicked
with the
right mouse button.

We also tried to put a small stack of recently done actions on the left edge
of
the window. Worked well but as Calum noted as a problem, the user will spend
some
time looking for what are in the list. But it is pretty fast.. It can be an
icon list
with text labels that opens for all icons at the same time. This is possible
because
the list is vertical.

Yet another time saver is to make a selection list if there are some actions
you know apriori the user are going to perform. This is very fast if you
somehow
queue the objects before the user interacts with them.

John

-----Opprinnelig melding-----
Fra: Tom Musgrove [mailto:TomM pentstar com]
Sendt: 13. november 2000 15:52
Til: Calum Benson; gnome-gui-list gnome org
Emne: RE: User interface suggestions


Perhaps we could have a floating menu/toolbar that has a list of the
frequently used items, and perhaps another for recently used?  This would
generate greater speed savings than the previous suggestions.  Another
possibility, is right clicking would have a submenu for frequently used
items.  Thus one wouldn't even have to move the mouse to utilize them...

Tom M.
TomM pentstar com

-----Original Message-----
From: gnome-gui-list-admin gnome org
[mailto:gnome-gui-list-admin gnome org]On Behalf Of Calum Benson
Sent: Monday, November 13, 2000 7:45 AM
To: gnome-gui-list gnome org
Subject: Re: User interface suggestions


"Blad, John Erling" wrote:

> It also don't solve the real problem because you *know* where the
> item is when you use it often. If you could generate a hint where
> a seldom used feature is located ..

It's an interesting idea that could work in some cases, but apart from
John's valid points, there are other potential problems with trying to
generalise the idea too-- for example, what do you do with submenus?
Should they have their own individual "most-recently/frequently-used"
lists?  Or should they share the same list as their parent menu?

Sub-menus (or even top level menus) with only a few items would be a
problem too-- you could conceivably end up with more items bold than
not-bold, which would have completely the opposite effect from the one
required: the non-bold items would stand out more.  Then there's
right-button menus-- what could you sensibly do with those?  Show the
most recently/frequently used menu items in that context, or in all
contexts that have a right-button menu, or in the main menu?

You could end up having to have a different policy for every menu in
your application to get around some of these problems  (e.g. only
highlight the most-recently-used 10% of the items on each menu), but
then you'd have a different number of bold items on each one, which
might be rather confusing.

Cheeri,
Calum.

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

Any opinions are personal and not necessarily those of Sun Microsystems

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