[interfacekit] Re: Accessing 2nd level menus

Axel Dörfler wrote:

Hi there,

I've got aware of a nice thing in at least Dano (dunno about R5): when a menu has a (open) submenu, you can move the mouse cursor over other items on the way to that submenu as long as you don't stop moving.
Interestingly, this only works as long as you move the cursor in the direction of the submenu; if the menu is on the right and you move the cursor to the left, the menu will close immediately after you've left the area of the originating menu item.
If you ask me, we should not only copy this behaviour, but also wait a tiny bit until closing the menu if the mouse cursor movement is interrupted (as you don't always move the cursor that smoothly).
Both of these helps the usability of these menus quite a bit.

Bye,
  Axel.


Here's some good info:

Question 6

     What is the bottleneck in hierarchical menus and what technique
     used on the Macintosh, but not on Windows, makes that bottleneck
     less of a problem? Can you think of other techniques that could be
     applied?

The bottleneck is the passage between the first-level menu and the second-level menu. Using Windows, users have to slide across just right, least they slip down to the next menu at the last moment.

When I specified the Mac hierarchical menu algorthm, I called for a V-shaped buffer zone, so that users could make an increasingly-greater error as they neared the hierarchical without fear of jumping to an unwanted menu. As long as they are moving a few pixels over for every one down, on average, the menu stays open. Apple hierarchicals are still far less efficient than single level menus, but at least they are less challenging than the average video game.

The Windows folks instead leave the hierarchical open for around a half-second before jumping down. Thus, as in so many of the other areas of their OS, they mimic the Mac without getting it right. They have decoupled cause and effect by 1/2 second, a long, long time in human-computer interaction. If you happen to get to the hierarchical within that half-second, the Windows behavior is indistinguishable from the Mac. If you don't, the behavior is just weird and few users can figure the rule out.

Here's the Source:
http://www.asktog.com/columns/022DesignedToGiveFitts.html

Here's More:
http://mail.gnome.org/archives/gtk-devel-list/2000-May/msg00114.html



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