Re: [Usability] New Menubars

[Diego Moya <turingt gmail com>]

Hi Anton,

2009/4/14 Anton Kerezov <ankere gmail com>:
> Right now this is just an idea I have. With it I try to improve the
> useless monotonous (repeated) actions done in order to access some
> submenus (we are not talking about shortcuts but about the visual side)
> as well as to innovate on the user interaction side (user workflow).

If you're interested in user workflow, it's good to see how others
have approached a similar problem from different perspectives.

Notice that when you allow users to type the first letters of a
command, it looks more and more like a Command Line Interface. Your
idea extends naturally to create a whole support for commands, not
just for displaying them but for introducing parameters and showing
immediate feedback (autocomplete, suggestions, preview results...)

I'd like to point you to the approach taken by the Ubiquity project (see:

 http://labs.mozilla.com/2008/08/introducing-ubiquity/

), which in turn takes ideas from Quicksilver and Launchbar. They try
to make a usable CLI with a visual treatment that very much resembles
your mockup, just with a more generalized reach.

They solve many of the usability problems found in traditional CLIs,
although they don't tackle your stated problem of trying to retrieve
recently used commands and store them in a "visual cache". The
solution to this problem found in your proposal is a nice feature, and
it could be a good improvement over a complete CLI system for the
Gnome Shell built following the Ubiquity and Quicksilver models.