Re: [Usability] Re: Menu order.

[Breda McColgan <Breda McColgan Sun COM>]

Hi Nadyne,

I might be wrong, but I think Pat is talking about the list of
applications in the Applications menu and submenus, not the menus within
each application.

For example:

  Applications
    Accessibility
    Accessories
    Games
    Graphics
    Internet
    Multimedia
    Office
    Programing
    Utilities


I've just checked on my Windows XP machine, and all of the menu items in
the Programs, Documents, and Settings menus are listed alphabetically: 
  * All submenus are listed first, in alphabetical order.
  * All individual menu items are listed after the final submenu, again
in alphabetical order.


As we're talking about personal preferences here, I must admit that I do
like to see applications listed in alphabetical order -- perhaps this is
because I am a technical writer ;P
The alphabetical order certainly makes it easier to find an item.

Having said that, I also agree with you that an alphabetical order is
not necessarily the ideal way to arrange items on an
application-specific menu. Your Cut/Copy/Paste is a good example. The
idea that Close and Quit are the last items on the File menu is now so
ingrained in me, that I am quite irritated when Close is buried in the
middle of the File menu! But perhaps all of this is learned behaviour
rather than intuitive -- I've been using a computer for almost 20 years
now, and can no longer remember what I thought of such things when I
first started!


Regards,
Breda.


Nadyne Mielke wrote:
> 
> At 01:55 AM 8/11/2004, Patrick Costello wrote:
> 
> >Do you disagree that alphabetical ordering is standard UI design practise?
> 
> I do disagree with this assertion of yours.  I read your first post with
> this assertion when I was at home on my Mac last night.  None of the
> applications that I had open at that time (Mail.app, Safari, ICQ, and Adobe
> FrameMaker) conformed to that assertion.  Today, I'm at work on my Win2k
> machine.  I have Lotus Notes, Firefox, Eudora, Lotus Sametime, and Eclipse
> open.  None of them conform to this "standard UI design practise".
> 
> I even opened up the design consistency guidelines for the product family
> on which I work.  Our design guidelines do not specify that an alphabetic
> ordering should be used.  For common menus across the family, the ordering for
> 
> There are many standard menu orderings which are not alphabetical.  I can't
> recall ever seeing an "edit" menu that didn't have cut, copy, and paste in
> that order.
> 
> The first consumer-grade WIMP interfaces didn't use an alphabetic
> ordering.  We can go back to GEOS on the C64 to see that.  The original Mac
> OS interface wasn't.  Windows certainly didn't, not even back in
> Win1.0.  None of these has moved to an alphabetic ordering, at least not in
> any of the applications that I've used in the past couple of days, and I
> can't remember that they ever did.
> 
> /nm
> 
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