Many menus have some kind of progressive disclosure, but they key to showing a subset of items is knowing which items are of extremely high frequency - which is possible for a copier but not always for complex software that people might use in different ways or where there are different groups that use different clusters of problems. Of course, you could have role-based progressive disclosure where the items you see are determined at login.
In the early days of GUIs, Apple tried to have"Novice" and "Expert" menus on some of the core products, but that was scrapped because it was slightly condescending and it was hard to define what "novices" and "experts" were. The description of the SAS system is probably chunked into "most frequent" at the top and then the rest in alphabetical order (usually repeating the ones at the top). This works well when you have good logging software or know that the first 5 items cover say 80-90% of the choices that users wil make. Chauncey On Wed, Feb 4, 2009 at 3:18 PM, Simon Clatworthy <clatw...@online.no> wrote: > I have seen combinations a few times. SAS airlines have a drop down > list of destinations that is alphabetical (and very long) but have > the major nordic destinations pulled out first as well. > That makes it a hell of a lot easier to use: > - is my destination one of these 5 > - if not, find it on the long list > > Isn't this really a use of the old photocopier rule: show a subset > of options and hide the full functionality under a cover until > needed? > > try it yourself at www.sas.no > > > . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . > Posted from the new ixda.org > http://www.ixda.org/discuss?post=38149 > > > ________________________________________________________________ > Welcome to the Interaction Design Association (IxDA)! > To post to this list ....... disc...@ixda.org > Unsubscribe ................ http://www.ixda.org/unsubscribe > List Guidelines ............ http://www.ixda.org/guidelines > List Help .................. http://www.ixda.org/help > ________________________________________________________________ Welcome to the Interaction Design Association (IxDA)! To post to this list ....... disc...@ixda.org Unsubscribe ................ http://www.ixda.org/unsubscribe List Guidelines ............ http://www.ixda.org/guidelines List Help .................. http://www.ixda.org/help
