Re: Debian menus policy
Craig Dickson <crdic@yahoo.com> writes:
> LarstiQ wrote:
>
> > Well, what Brian Nelson wrote touches the issue I believe. It is nice
> > (or even productive) to match the thought processes of a user, which
> > might be hard without some research. This is nicely shown by the
> > differences between how Thomas Hood would like a menu, and how for
> > example you like one.
>
> Right. I should have made that point clearly in my response to Brian,
> that I don't believe that the sequence "editing->text->emacs" matches
> the way most people will think as well as "text->editor->emacs" will. My
> disagreement isn't that I don't want the menus to relate naturally to
> the way users think!
I think this arrangement would not produce as nice of a menu
hierarchy. For example, there's only 2 things you do with text--view
it and edit it. And since every text editor that's been written in
the last 25 years or so is also capable of viewing text, a "text
viewer" is not terribly useful. Therefore, the menu would be heavily
balanced toward editors rather than viewers.
I think I read somewhere that humans can optimally parse up to 7
pieces of information at a time. Any submenu that has more than 7
entries is going to make it difficult for a user to find anything
quickly.
The Debian menus fail miserably in this respect. Look at the number
of entries in Apps->System or Apps->Tools. What a useless mess.
I think a structure in which function was at the highest level would
promote a more usable menu hierarchy by these guidelines, don't you
think? I think you could cover the functionality of all the apps in
the menu with ~7 generic functions pretty nicely.
Personally, I think any change would be a good change because I find
the Debian menus completely unusable.
--
Brian Nelson <nelson@bignachos.com>
BigNachos@jabber.org
http://bignachos.com
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