On 2023-10-13 10:43, Jürgen Spitzmüller wrote:
Am Freitag, dem 13.10.2023 um 08:05 +0200 schrieb Daniel:
It seems to be a rather universally accepted UI rule that menu items
should not be hidden. Feel free to can check your favorite apps or
search the recommendation on the web. (There is also the more extreme
recommendations to not even disable menu entries but I think it is
generally agreed that this is a bad idea because it leaves the user
clicking in vain.)
Don't like it since
1.) we will end up in overcrowded menus full of disabled entries. Too
long for sure in some cases
An example would be interesting. As I mentioned, I enabled all menu
items and didn't notice too long menus (not longer than in other popular
apps anyway).
2.) we will run out of accelerators. We currently can provide
accelerators in the insert and edit menus only since we only show
active items.
You are right, that I don't know much about the accelerator stuff. But I
am a bit puzzled how hiding the menus fixes the accelerator problem.
Doesn't that mean that some menus entries don't have any accelerators or
that some menu entries will have the same as others?
I know you don't care about accelerators as they seem to be not common
on Mac OS. However, I find them a key element of accessibility and much
more important that some sort of user didactic by showing which
functions there might be. I also don't see what users gain if they see
a disabled function as long as they don't learn when and how it is
enabled.
Users have a chance of directly inferring from a disabled menu when and
how it is enabled or they can then try to look it up. Not seeing a menu
entry in the first place seems not help in that respect.
The two HIGs I consulted (and actually the two we base LyX UI on) have
this to say:
"Menus should contain between three and twelve items, and submenus
should contain between three and six items."
No word about hiding or not hiding items, but it's clear that you can
only achieve this by selective display.
https://developer.gnome.org/hig/patterns/controls/menus.html?highlight=menu
And
"Don't put more than 12 items within a single level of a menu. Add
separators between logical groups within a menu. Organize the menu
items into groups of seven or fewer strongly related items."
It also says:
"Disable menu items that don't apply to the current context instead of
removing them from view. Exception: It is acceptable to hide menu items
completely if they are permanently unavailable on the user's system due
to missing hardware capabilities."
But this is hard to achieve with the number of items we have.
I think the "(3 to) 12 item" rule is often broken by larger apps while,
as far as I can see, the "don't hide menu items" rule is not.
In any case, however this discussion turns out, this is not something
to be implemented so shortly before a major release. If done, it has to
be implemented very early in a development cycle and then carefully
tested.
For sure.
Daniel
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