Re: [Usability] Re: Menu order.

[Andre Schaefer <a schaefer uni-duisburg de>]

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Patrick Costello wrote:

| Do you disagree that alphabetical ordering is standard UI design
| practise? Do you disagree that users worldwide are accustomed to this
| approach?

I've wondered - and inspected some applications I use on a daily base:
Mozilla, Vim, ROX-Filer, OpenOffice...

None of them orders the menus alphabetically. Neither do common gnome
apps, like gedit or gnome-terminal.

The users would be accustomed to that approach, if it would be so highly
consistently in reality. But it isn't. So I tend to disagree on your
hypothesis. Have you some backing or proof for that claim?

| Or are you putting forward a personal preference that this is not the
| way things should be?
|
| Before we reject an established, familiar framework, we must have a
| clear picture of an alternative model with sound reasons backing up that
| model, based on factual observations and wide user feedback.

Agreed.

|
| You quote one possible reason for change above, i.e. that an intuitive
| UI would be more useful than a character-dependent framework. While this
| argument appears to have merit, after all who amongst us would deny the
| value of intuitive design, the difficulty lies in defining "intuitive".
| What appears intuitive to one user, might look like the results of a
| blindfolded darts match to another. What is clearly intuitive in one
| locale, could be totally counter-intuitive in another. Fair enough, a
| user who is familiar with the UI across locales will be >>familiar<<
| with the structure, but for your average single-language user, the
| structure could appear to be completely random, daunting, and requiring
| a major effor to learn and remember where everything is located.

I think that is already the case, despite the alphabetical ordering. My
Applications menu has already 14 entries. My short term memory has only
7 +/- 2 places - so I need to use my long term memory and a considerable
amount of cognitive load to memorize where I find my prefered
applications. Fortunately it's easy to change the menu according to my
needs - but that's already an expert function.

| For many people, because of educational and life-long habit,
| alphabetical ordering of menus >>is<< the most intuitive, surely.

Again: Why do you think so?

| Also, as an earlier respondent to this thread pointed out, the
| multi-lingual usage is probably a minority audience. Is there sufficient
| reason to change the UI structure for the majority audience, to
| accommodate the minority audience. Only if the majority audience will
| also benefit, but I do not think we have established that.

I have suffered the problem several times - as the locales did change in
our comuting environment several times. I would have been very happy, if
the ordering would have stayed the same. Most Notably the
Applications>Desktop-Preferences entry. That should really have it's own
~ easily accessible place.

| Anyway, as I asked earlier, what is really being proposed?
|
| - Change the default?
| - Provide a customizable menu order option?

I vote: both.

... just my 2 cents.

* André Schaefer
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