Re: User interface suggestions

[Calum Benson <calum benson ireland sun com>]

"Blad, John Erling" wrote:

> It also don't solve the real problem because you *know* where the
> item is when you use it often. If you could generate a hint where
> a seldom used feature is located ..

It's an interesting idea that could work in some cases, but apart from
John's valid points, there are other potential problems with trying to
generalise the idea too-- for example, what do you do with submenus? 
Should they have their own individual "most-recently/frequently-used"
lists?  Or should they share the same list as their parent menu?

Sub-menus (or even top level menus) with only a few items would be a
problem too-- you could conceivably end up with more items bold than
not-bold, which would have completely the opposite effect from the one
required: the non-bold items would stand out more.  Then there's
right-button menus-- what could you sensibly do with those?  Show the
most recently/frequently used menu items in that context, or in all
contexts that have a right-button menu, or in the main menu?

You could end up having to have a different policy for every menu in
your application to get around some of these problems  (e.g. only
highlight the most-recently-used 10% of the items on each menu), but
then you'd have a different number of bold items on each one, which
might be rather confusing.

Cheeri,
Calum.
 
-- 
CALUM BENSON, Usability Engineer       Sun Microsystems Ireland
mailto:calum benson ireland sun com    Desktop Engineering Group
http://www.sun.ie                      +353 1 819 9771

Any opinions are personal and not necessarily those of Sun Microsystems