Re: [Usability] Re: Menu order.

[Nadyne Mielke <nmielke acm org>]

At 01:55 AM 8/11/2004, Patrick Costello wrote:

> Do you disagree that alphabetical ordering is standard UI design practise?

I do disagree with this assertion of yours.  I read your first post with 
this assertion when I was at home on my Mac last night.  None of the 
applications that I had open at that time (Mail.app, Safari, ICQ, and Adobe 
FrameMaker) conformed to that assertion.  Today, I'm at work on my Win2k 
machine.  I have Lotus Notes, Firefox, Eudora, Lotus Sametime, and Eclipse 
open.  None of them conform to this "standard UI design practise".

I even opened up the design consistency guidelines for the product family 
on which I work.  Our design guidelines do not specify that an alphabetic 
ordering should be used.  For common menus across the family, the ordering for

There are many standard menu orderings which are not alphabetical.  I can't 
recall ever seeing an "edit" menu that didn't have cut, copy, and paste in 
that order.

The first consumer-grade WIMP interfaces didn't use an alphabetic 
ordering.  We can go back to GEOS on the C64 to see that.  The original Mac 
OS interface wasn't.  Windows certainly didn't, not even back in 
Win1.0.  None of these has moved to an alphabetic ordering, at least not in 
any of the applications that I've used in the past couple of days, and I 
can't remember that they ever did.

/nm