Keeping The Menu Simple

i agree with PSzalapski. some users want the advanced stuff: its why linux STILL doesn’t have user-friendly administration tools. just make it simple for the people who want it simple, and make it advanced for those who want it advanced.

Yeah, you could limit the number of choices in software. You could make everything much simpler and non-configurable. You could make all menus consist of the top 5 most commonly selected options. And everything would look simpler, more streamlined and be easy to use.

But then… you’d have a Mac.

Personally I like fully configurable software and OS’s. And I can’t stand being corralled into a set of simple options. (Yes. If you’re a Mac user you have fewer options.) But that’s why I live on my PC and my mac sits in my living room where it lives its life as a glorified jukebox.

@Popo: Actually, if you have a mac, you have MORE options. On a mac, you can run windows apps side by side on the same machine, as well as run the fully unix-ified Mac OS X, with its slick UI as well as tweakable underpinnings.

Welcome to 2007. Sounds like you are stuck with a 1990 conception of macs.

After reading this the last thing I’m thinking about is that options form. I’m hungry! :slight_smile:

I’ve always tried to keep things simple but sometimes you want to provide those advanced options to power users. It’s hard to strike the perfect balance.

I always used to believe in the KISS approach but I’m slowly learning that two layers for user options are more realistic and useable. Not everyone wants to see every single option like I do.

Why make things simple, when it’s so easy to make them complicated? :wink:

Just pick good defaults, then put the advanced options somewhere that the GUI can still go. Oh- wipe the grease off the pattie, throw away the pickles and dont spit on my burger :slight_smile:

Funny, you only save 5 cents by ordering the combo instead of double-double, fries, and coke separately. That nickel must go in some executive jacuzzi fund.

Jeff As usual you provide a lot of good information in your post. However, as has already been pointed out to you the most important thing is to make the software no more complicated than it has to be.

Though thousands of developers know by now that determining which features are necessary in an application is not always a trivial problem

That’s nothing Jeff, the stupidest example of an options screen using tabs is the active directory user properties window, heres a picture of it:

http://searchexchange.techtarget.com/digitalguide/images/Misc/ch5_Page_64_Image_0001.jpg

That’s 20 tab pages spread over 5 rows. Everytime you click on one option the row ordering changes so you’re never sure where a tab you saw a minute ago now is.

I know the average user of this screen is a network/sys admin type and might be expected to handle complexity.

However it’s hilarious to watch a stressed-out sys admin using this screen just trying to get their job done.

Probably even funnier is that your average sys-admin would NEVER admit to being confused/annoyed by such a screen. They see this as admitting to an inability to deal with complexity, the more complex (ie stupid) the design the more of a “challenge” it is to overcome. So while this attitude is still so prevalent I guess people will reap what they sow.

Ash

G’day Jeff, I’m halfway through “Getting Real” (you link to it in the first paragraph), I wondered about your thoughts on it.

Cheers, Thomas

This is something I’ve thought about on more than one occasion in attempts to switch over to open source applications. Somehow Text Editors really seem to take the cake… I seem to recall PSPad and Notepad++ having a ridiculous amount of menu.

I think the search boxes that have been popping up in preference/options windows lately have been a decent (and possibly the lazy man’s) solution as well.

Really great video on the subject, taken from a speech at Google by Barry Schwartz. The paradox of choice:
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=6127548813950043200q=paradox+of+choicetotal=53start=0num=100so=0type=searchplindex=0

Fast food looks fine, it tastes fine, but it actually doesn’t provide anything good to your body.

Make your software “default settings” to behave like what 90% of people expect, so probably they never need to go to the options. But don’t make the mistake to assume everybody likes burger and chips.

Fast food made people ignorant about one of the important things in life: food. I’m Italian, I know something about the food culture.

Don’t make the same mistake on software products. Don’t make them like fast food. Don’t push to make it easier for people to become ignorant.

Max

I love having an absurd abundance of options! I hate when all the advanced options are hidden away. I actually want thousands upon thousands of options, with lots of lengthy descriptions. I love finding an assload of options and treaking a program to my liking.

I hate that Firefox has removed many options from the preferences dialog, so that I have to use extensions or muck about in about:config where nothing is labeled. However, the ability to customize Firefox to an arbitrary level is what I love about it. The interface is composed of a bunch of XML, CSS, and JavaScript, so it’s easy to write extensions, scripts, and styling to alter Firefox to however I want it.

If you so desire, please feel free to throw 99% of the options into an advanced preferences dialog, but please never think it’s a good idea to just get rid of it!

I totally agree with In-N-Out Burger. Most People aka users don’t use or need all the choices and features. I should know. I worked as a trainer for MS-Office software for 9 years. When your product needs a trainer to teach people how to use it, then the UI failed. Period.

Jeff: Why, would you say, the “File” menu item permeates so many applications?

There are many things in File that ought not to be there such as “File - Quit.”

What does the concept of a file have to do with the termination of an application? “Actions - Quit” or “Status - Quit” makes more sense.

One way to reduce the number of tabs would simply be to increase the size of the thing. While I’m not familiar with the application, something like “Files”, “Documents” and “File Filters” sounds like it could be put under a single header with not that much trouble.

I mean, even if you’re stuck at 800 x 600 (and in that case you can simply make it -wider- ), I’m sure you can conveniently put some options on the same tabs. Why cram everything in a window straight out of 1997? (the answer: the application will scale to fullscreen without problem, but menus are rarely reconsidered for this). While a fullscreen configuration window might be overkill, it’s still not using the available screen space efficiently. This leads to the rows and rows of tabs in a cramped window.

IMHO multi-row tabs should be “refactored” to a vertical list of settings (don’t have an example of this at the moment, but I’ve seen it in mIRC) where you can fold/expand those you don’t need, and have the most common options at the “root” nodes. It’s pretty common in every other editor. Since requesting the window’s resolution is trivial (compared to doing this with JS and several browsers) you can adjust at least the height of the options window, making the actions that expand the menu options visible without scrolling.

On a tangent: who still wants to see a splash screen nowadays? It’s an excuse for a slow-loading application; you need to give the user feedback that it has loaded or that it is doing so. In the worst case it means an extra click (Welcome to Foo, click here to continue). Applications that -allow you to turn it off- mostly don’t need it anyway because they load fast enough (something like Photoshop shows you which plugin or font it is loading; useful information. Eclipse; ditto).

Tip of the day? That’s relying on a random intrusive messaging system to provide useful information; kind of like throwing darts blindfolded and only getting bullseye every 2 weeks or so, and throwing it on a different day than anyone else.

There’s probably a dozen of these old UI concepts that have become outdated or need to be fixed (maybe it’s nice to do a blog post about this too?). It’s not that user-friendlyness changes; it’s that the widgets are expanded or redesigned to fit the user’s needs because in some cases the standard ones are not sufficient. Pretty much all of it has to do with the dimensions of the space of choice where you can move freely in; you don’t use an U-Haul truck to move your cat to the vet. It’ll work, but it’ll be awkward. If a menu gets too big, rethink it before you can’t fix it anymore.

The argument against this of course is that once people get used to the menus they generally dislike any changes to it. Again, it underscores the needs - when you update your app, you might as well take another good look at the options/configuration system (and other menus). Disastrous example of where this has been forgotten: In Windows XP, go to Control Panel Fonts File Install New Font. In Vista it’s STILL there, though it’s better hidden (right-click on the contents of the folder and choose Install New Font. Welcome to 1994).

No! Don’t push this! Some users want the advanced options. The key is hiding the advanced options away some place. A good example is firefox:

  • Most users never need the menus
  • Some users will go into Preferences
  • A few of those will click on the “Advanced” or “more” options there
  • A few of those will at some point go to about:config.

Don’t take away my advanced options–just write a better UI!

PSzalapski, Office 2007 is actually a good example of Keeping The Menu Simple in action. The main UI is pared down to the most essential, most frequently used functions-- the burger, fries, and drink of word processing, if you will…

… but the “Options” dialog is more equivalent to In-N-Out’s secret menu.

The Office 2007 option dialog is still available for advanced tweaking. It even uses tabs, in a form. The left side of the dialog has 9 selectable buttons that switch the main panel.

Sounds great to me–however, the original post said “leave the giant, confusing menu of options for your competitors”–I want to leave the giant confusing menu for your advanced users someplace where most users won’t ever secret. We need the secret menu–just keep it secret.

Too often in the past, Microsoft products (and many others) completely remove the secret menu. Thus, I couldn’t order it animal style no matter what I say! Microsoft does seem to be doing better.