I am beginning to lean toward the idea that when designed properly, context menus in RIAs can actually support productivity by providing more immediate object manipulation. As Chauncey noted, it really depends on your core audience.
In general, primary actions related to flow should be visible on the UI surface (vs tucked-away). Also, decisions about custom actions in context menus are informed by whether or not the browser's context menu actually provides more useful actions for a specific object type than a what custom context menu could provide. Someone mentioned the training aspect as related to enterprise applications. It seems to me that ease-of-use and learnability reduce training requirements, which saves money. Learning an application that relies on context menus (hidden functions) increases learning time. Decisions about where and how to use context menus are informed by whether a beginner-intermediate person can discover the context menu functions and grok the intended usage patterns. Thanks for the inspiration and guidance, all of you. I have the various perspectives I need to move forward with some experiments. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Posted from the new ixda.org http://www.ixda.org/discuss?post=38441 ________________________________________________________________ Welcome to the Interaction Design Association (IxDA)! To post to this list ....... [email protected] Unsubscribe ................ http://www.ixda.org/unsubscribe List Guidelines ............ http://www.ixda.org/guidelines List Help .................. http://www.ixda.org/help
