Le 15 févr. 05, à 12:23, Frederico Muñoz a écrit :
On 2005-02-15 09:37:55 +0000 Markus Hitter <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
The big advantage, supported by research results, of a menu attached to a
screen edge is, you have to adjust your mouse movement in one direction only,
in the other direction the screen border is your guide. Horizontal menus on
the top border reduce the required accuracy of mouse movement even further,
because the size of the menu normal to the required movement is typically
bigger.
This is always an advantage but competes with the need of a possibly very
long mouse movement on large screens.
Yes, I see the point, Fitz's Law and all that, but I'm assuming that the vertical, floating menu is available on right click, wherever the user has the pointer. This would make this kind of menu the simplest to use because the mouse movement is reduced to the minimum, since the menu appears under the current position.
I can imagine that it's possible to have a horizontal menu and still retain this behaviour, but IMHO it's more consistent to have it always in the floating, vertical fashion, since it will look better when the user detaches part of the submenus. But a compromise is certainly possible.
In my opinion, the Mac horizontal menu bar usability is the best when the menus don't have too many items (no more than ~15) and avoid to use submenus as much as possible (because of the really restricted path to navigate between two hierarchical menus and the discontinuity induced in the mouse movement)… when the menu complexity increases the NeXT menu window usability is unmatched because it is support perfectly submenus (nested with 3 hierarchical levels to take an example) which are a real pain with other horizontal menus layout, and moreover this very good support of hierarchical menus permit avoid root menus too much crowded as you can see in Mac OS X applications.
Quentin.
-- Quentin Mathé [EMAIL PROTECTED]
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