Re: [Usability] Usability Digest, Vol 60, Issue 7

[Jacob Beauregard <deadowlsurvivor gmail com>]

That is one of the most impressive mockups I have ever seen.

I don't think the alt+key functionality is a total pitfall, but a
consistent and obvious means to reveal them doesn't seem like it would
require too much cleverness.

What's a more difficult question is the ctrl+shortcuts.

The other concern would be Ctrl+key shortcut visibility. I know the GIMP
places Ctrl+key shortcuts in tooltips. However, I question the overall
usability of tooltips, particularly because of their delay which, in
extension, increases the power-user learning curve. Then, another
concern would be a solution to this that resembles emacs.

Besides this, the other concern would be apps that use menus and
traditionally present short widths (Empathy or Pidgin, for instance), OR
have unreasonably long menus or unreasonably long-worded menu options
which would be not so much in GNOME, but apps that are distributed
alongside GNOME.

On Wed, 2009-04-15 at 12:00 +0000, usability-request gnome org wrote:
> 
> Message: 1
> Date: Tue, 14 Apr 2009 21:46:15 +0300
> From: Anton Kerezov <ankere gmail com>
> Subject: Re: [Usability] New Menubars
> To: Gnome Usability <usability gnome org>
> Message-ID: <1239734775 5951 213 camel ubuntu ubuntu-domain>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset="UTF-8"
> 

> This topic come to my mind but I'm still wondering what would be best:
> -- Show sub-sub menus as dropdowns.
> -- Show small windows as an extension to the menu list with good icons
> if possible. They may be pinned too. See this mockup (took a long time
> to find a gnome app that has more than one level of menus, not to talk
> about 2 or 3):
> http://img179.imageshack.us/my.php?image=newmenusystem.png
> (there are missing items)
>  
> -- By introducing good animations (e.g. fade out and move to the entry
> for submenu selections and sliding in the new sub-sub menus in). But
> this method may prove hard to navigate back and confuse users.
> 
> 
> > 2. do you think it is acceptable to use ALT as a trigger to set the
> >    focus to the input window?
> > 
> >    Today we press Alt+<letter> to access a particular menu entry, so
> >    why not make it Alt+<first N letters> to naturally extend the
> >    existing method?
> 
> It would be good but as many of the gnome desktops are translated in
> many languages and people use mainly English (as me) these shortcuts are
> not working. So a good thing will be that it exist another visual manner
> involving the mouse. What do you think?
> 
> 
> >    It will be in conflict with the fact that for some menu entries the
> >    Alt+<letter> key is not always the first letter of the menu item.
> 
> That is the other problem but menuitems have description (as they
> usually have displayed in the statusbar) and the search could be
> extended via user option to that description is included too.
> 
> Another solution is to have text search for submenu items and if there
> is a match a auto-complete list will be shown.
> 
> 
> >    Also, not to say that Vista is a perfect example to follow, but in
> >    there they hide menus by default and Alt shows/hides it - in other
> >    words the choice of Alt will be quite consistent with the other
> >    environments.
> 
> Agree.
> 
> 
> Best regards, 
> Anton
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
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