From: c s <rb_dev_at_yahoo.com>
Date: Mon, 19 Jan 2004 18:40:45 -0800 (PST)

--- ozric01_at_gmx.net wrote:
>
> You can blame me for that reorganization. I did this
> patch because the
> main menu was totally cluttered before. I'm in to
> HCI (Human Computer
> Interaction) and did work at a usability lab for
> It's a basic
> rule in HCI that the number of menu entries should
> not exceed 7. And

That may be a good rule of thumb, but not at the
expense of burrying under levels of sub-menus items
that logically, or because of frequency of use, are
better placed at a higher level, such as items that
are not persistant or "set once and forget" type of
settings that must instead be accessed every time you
want to use them. That is why "Bookmarks" is correctly
at the top level. That is also why the sleeptimer
formerly was correctly at the top level instead of
being burried 3 levels down where it is now.


> it's bad practise to force users to scroll to see
> all options.

It's also bad practise to burry things too deep into
the menus instead of putting them higher where they
more logically belong. Inforcing an absolute no-scroll
 rule at the expense of other good practices isn't
necessarily the way to go.

> That can
> only be achieved by deeper levels, of course. The
> tricky thing is to
> group the entries logically.
> In this sense the menu reorganization was NOT poorly
> thought out. It
> just follows widely accepted guidelines. What I
> might have missed, is
> which options are used more frequently. But that's
> subjective to some
> extent.
> What about making "Manage Settings" the
> first entry in the
> system menu?

"Manage Settings" belongs at the top level. There is
nothing about .cfg related operations that would
logically put it three levels in beside other "System"
settings since .cfg files are used to controll ALL
settings, not just system settings, and not even just
general settings.


>
> - peter
>
> Maybe we should carry out some usability tests...
>

Yes we should.

=====
Craig

rb_dev_at_yahoo.com

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Received on 2004-01-20