Re: [Usability] New Menubars

[Philip Ganchev <phil ganchev gmail com>]

On Thu, Apr 16, 2009 at 6:43 AM, Anton Kerezov <ankere gmail com> wrote:
[...]
> Gome-DO is a good thing but IMO they have bloated it too much with all kinds
> of useless plug-ins (of course you can turn them off). What is good about do
> is that when you type it learns what you want the end result to be and
> autocomplets it - that is something that is worth intgerating in the new
> menu system.

This could be a disadvantage because it would interfere with
habituation. The user would always have to check if the command they
want is in the position they expect, in case the computer has learned
since the last time the user used the command.

Anton, sorry but I still do not understand the purpose of your idea.
It might help if you give an example use-case.  Is the purpose the
same as with my idea (text search for menu items and any other
commands)? If so, then I think we should evaluate and compare our
design choices. Do you agree?

[...]
> - you have a box that assits you request a group of commands and lay out
> them in the menubar area (the way the items are shown is topic that should
> be thought on a lot)

How do I request the group: text search? Can it show commands (menu
items) that are in different menus. For example, when I type  "scal",
it will find "Layer -> Scale layer..." and "Image -> Scale image..."?

> - help you execute commands but that would not be the primary goal of this
> interface because you cannot learn so many specific words and if you do you
> will forget them easily when you don't use the system for a while.

What do you mean by "commands"? In my proposal, help with executing
commands is a major motivation; "command" to me includes menu entries.

Alan Day wrote:

"There's a lot of interest in ways to combine command (text) and
graphical interfaces at the moment - an interest that I share. There's
definitely an advantage there for repetitive actions, as well as some
exciting possibilities around natural language input."

And a huge advantage in finding the action you want (compared to
looking through the menus) and streamlining the user input (compared
to mousing through the menus).

Natural language may be good, but it is likely to be difficult to
design and implement well. We should pick the low-lying fruit (text
search) now, thus creating a framework to incorporate NL with more
thought.