Re: [Usability] Question: design choice of menubars

[Calum Benson <Calum Benson Sun COM>]

On Mon, 2004-09-20 at 14:36, Sean Middleditch wrote:

> I just have to ask - have you _seen_ the monitors Apple sells?  ;-)

Yes :)  But I was speaking purely comparatively... I'd still wager there
are a lot more big-screen *nix CAD users etc. than big-screen OSn users
out there, although I daresay they're catching up.

> Given that context menus generally aren't supposed to show you anything
> that you can't already get done using other buttons or the menu bar
> itself, that wouldn't be too huge of a problem, would it?  It would just
> get rid of having two separate menu for doing largely the same thing.

That's true of course, but they do save you the trouble of hunting
through the entire menu structure for things you can do to the selected
object.  Once you know what those things are and where they live on the
menus, their advantage is certainly somewhat reduced, although the
interaction required to select something from a context menu is still
likely to be less than from a full set of menus.

One solution could be to have a menu on the menu bar that just had the
context-sensitive items on it... but then you still have to select then
move, rather than just right-clicking an object to both select it and
display its context menu at the same time.

Cheeri,
Calum.

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

Any opinions are personal and not necessarily those of Sun Microsystems