Re: Right-justified help menu?

[sungod <sungod atdot org>]

On Thu, Apr 20, 2000 at 12:06:23PM -0500, Gregory Merchan (merchan@baton.phys.lsu.edu) wrote:
> Jim Cape wrote:
> "Well, right justification of the Help menu may make it easier for you to find
> because you are used to it, but it doesn't for ex-users of every other operating
> system on the planet."
> 
> Alan Shutko wrote:
> "Not Mac users, iirc."
> 
> Macintosh, pre-95 Windows, and CDE all place the help menu on the far right. On
> the Mac this is enforced by having the universal menubar.

Incorrect. Mac OS 8 and above have fixed the help menu so it's left-justified.

The point of making it right-justified in the first place was so it could take advantage of Fitts' Law by constraining the mouse pointer to a corner of the screen, thereby making the help menu an easier target. Since the Mac OS now uses that for their application menu, putting the help menu there proved to be a useless exception to an otherwise consistent menu model.

As stated, this has been fixed.

> Pre-95 Windows was a
> knock-off of Motif Window manager and the Motif style. Motif guidelines (2.1,
> maybe others?) require the help menu item to be right justified; this goes for CDE
> also, of course. Windows 95 et seq. are the only systems I know of that pack
> all the menu items on the left.

Note also that Windows, among other UI's, copied this behavior off of the Mac OS, but didn't copy the global menubar fixed at the top of the screen and so they never really had the benefit of Fitts' Law. Why they decided to use this behavior is still open to discussion; few UI resources I'm familiar with have been exactly kind to Microsoft's design department for their menu decisions.

> sungod wrote:
> "Can you please point us to research you or someone else has done on this
> topic?"
> 
> Not yet.

Consider reading <http://ei.cs.vt.edu/~cs5724/g1/> as part of your research.

> (In searching with Google I found this is an old topic on this list. I'll have
> to go through the archives soon.)

You'll find opinions are plentiful and cover the entire spectrum, and that few of them actually contribute useful information (research, documentation, anything besides "I want it this way because I'm used to it"). If you'd like to improve the discussion, we'd very warmly welcome your contributions.
-- 

Everything on television is fake.
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