On Thu, 2003-10-02 at 18:34, Anna Marie Dirks wrote: > It would be really nice to know what logic informed the creators of the > HIG when they decided this; is this a working memory issue? a muscle > control issue? just a nice sounding number?
More of a searching issue than a memory issue really... a looong time ago I helped do a little study in which we looked at how quickly people could find things on a fairly-randomly-ordered list which was known to contain the the thing they were looking for, and performance was shown to drop off more rapidly if it was longer than about ten items. Of course, if the menu's contents are constant (as they are on an application's menu bar), memory plays into this over time and you can usually get away with longer ones. And searching is easier if things are more strongly grouped too, as they can be on context menus. But nonetheless context menus can vary quite a lot depending on where you happen to click and the current state of the app, so there tends to be a bit more searching involved than with a regular menu. But, basically, it's just a guideline I've carried around and blindly quoted since then :) The suggestion not to use submenus on right-click menus is partly an extension of this, and partly just a fiddliness issue... submenus can be tricky and time-consuming to navigate at the best of times. So to me it just seems logical that you shouldn't force the user to navigate them in the context of something that, by definition, is supposed to make their task quicker and easier. Cheeri, Calum. -- CALUM BENSON, Usability Engineer Sun Microsystems Ireland mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] GNOME Desktop Group http://ie.sun.com +353 1 819 9771 Any opinions are personal and not necessarily those of Sun Microsystems _______________________________________________ evolution-hackers maillist - [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://lists.ximian.com/mailman/listinfo/evolution-hackers
