[Usability] Another reason why Navigating Long menus is Hard! [was Re: [Usability] Re: [Epiphany] epiphany toolbar/bookmarks]

[Alan Horkan <horkana maths tcd ie>]

On 1 Jun 2003, Marco Pesenti Gritti wrote:

> I'll just add users that doesnt have good computers skills. Navigating
> and organizing deep hierarchies is a difficult task for most not
> technical users ihmo.

Part of the reason for menus being difficult to navigate is bad menu
widgets.

Someone seems to have decided that having a long menu wrap around (as
opposed to scroll) was a bad idea, but I have not yet discovered an
explanation why.  Perhaps this behavior was confusing for some users but
at least it works. Having to scroll up a menu that is more than a few
items longer than the screen height is incredibly tedious and infuriating.

Here is a screenshot of the Evil widget, incase I have not been clear
enough.
http://www.maths.tcd.ie/~horkana/testing/Mozilla-EvilMenuScrollingWidget.png

I went from using and organising bookmarks meticulously to barely using
them at all.  My Netscape bookmarks file was over 100 kilobytes, (not
unicode, which would have doubled the size of the file) but when I
switched to Mozilla I pretty much completely stopped using bookmarks.  I
have only recently started using bookmarks again since Mozilla keywords
which allow me to avoid menu navigation or typing long complicated
locations.

I wish more website used mod_rewrite to display meaningful intelligible
locations.

Sincerely

Alan Horkan
http://advogato.org/person/AlanHorkan/