Re: [Usability] Cascading Menus, Context Menus, and Moving Files

[Calum Benson <Calum Benson Sun COM>]

On Mon, 2007-05-21 at 21:14 -0400, Jacob Beauregard wrote:
> Context menus are generally used by more novice users that 
> haven't learned keyboard shortcuts. Keyboard shortcuts are usually where 
> users rely on muscle memory. Novice users, on the other hand, are more 
> inclined to rely on the context menus.

I'm not sure I'd necessarily agree with that statement.  Many novice
users don't even know that context menus exist.  And for expert users,
context menus are still more convenient to use than keyboard shortcuts
in some situations, and less convenient in others.

E.g. in Glade 2, if there was a keyboard shortcut for inserting/deleting
rows in a table, I'm pretty sure I'd never use it instead of the context
menu.  But I do use the keyboard shortcuts for Cut/Copy/Paste quite
extensively in the same application.  There is doubtless a reason for
this preference that I haven't yet tried to analyse :)

Cheeri,
Calum.

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

Any opinions are personal and not necessarily those of Sun Microsystems