Re: Quick menubar question

[Calum Benson <calum benson sun com>]

"Guillermo S. Romero / Familia Romero" wrote:

> There is a small extension to add stop-focus (like focus follows
> mouse, but only if the mouse has stopped or is slow) to Sawfish.

This is true, but that's the sort of kludge that always makes me think
"if you need to do something like that to make it work, then there's
probably something fundamentally wrong with the design somewhere".

There's also the issue of how slow is "slow"-- somebody with a motor
impairment may move the mouse much more slowly and jerkily than an
"ordinary" user, which may prevent them using these Mac-style menus at
all.  But ironically, these are the users who could benefit from it
most, as Fitt's law means they wouldn't have to position the mouse so
precisely to access a menu.  (Of course, they could just use
click-to-focus instead of mouse-follows-focus, but that puts an
additional motor burden on them).

> Option to clone the menu many times?

Hmm, another kludge...  :o)  Well, maybe not-- actually repeating the
menu bar once on each display might help, although I've never seen it
done on any other desktops that support multiple displays.  This might
be because they've just never thought of it, of course, or perhaps
because it's too hard to implement.

> I believe some studies say it is faster... but I dunno about any study
> of people thinking something is faster and thus being happier (use
> people inner watch instead of a stop watch, you know, "lunch time?
> time flies! I nearly did it all and not notices time passing").

Apple did some research on this sort of thing, when they compared mouse
v. keyboard times.  To quote from an article on www.asktog.com:

"We've done a cool $50 million of R & D on the Apple Human Interface. We
discovered, among other things, two pertinent facts:
-Test subjects consistently report that keyboarding is faster than
mousing. 
-The stopwatch consistently proves mousing is faster than keyboarding."

In those tests at least, the keyboard users were happy because they
thought they were doing things faster, even though they weren't.  But as
you say, making users feel happy and productive is indeed one aspect of
making an interface "usable", even though they may not be doing things
in the most efficient way.  

(There's an interesting conflict here if you're designing software for
use in a business environment, where some managers would prefer their
workers to be doing things the most efficient way whether it makes them
feel happy or not!)

> > All these are just arguments against having the Mac-like menu bar as the
> > default, though... it would probably work just fine for some (maybe even
> > most) people, and it does have its advantages.
>
> Good reason to propose it as an option, no?

Certainly, I've no objection to it being an option.  Well, no more
objection than I have to any of the other fifty billion options your
average GNOME user has to contend with, anyway  :o)

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