On 2023-11-01 15:41, Jürgen Spitzmüller wrote:
Furthermore, most HIGs suggest a much lower number of entries per menu.
"Menus should contain between three and twelve items, and submenus
should contain between three and six items."
https://developer.gnome.org/hig/patterns/controls/menus.html#menus
"Don't put more than 12 items within a single level of a menu."
https://develop.kde.org/hig/components/navigation/menubar/
"Be mindful of menu length. People need more time and attention to read
a long menu, which means they may miss the command they want. If a menu
is long, you might need to break it into separate menus. In some cases,
you can use a submenu to shorten the list. The exception is a menu that
contains user-defined or dynamically generated content, such as the
History and Bookmarks menus in Safari. In this situation, people expect
the menu to accommodate the items they add to it, so a long menu is
fine, and scrolling is acceptable."
https://developer.apple.com/design/human-interface-guidelines/menus
Is there any evidence for the "no more 12 items" rule? So many more
complicated applications have much longer menus which seems to oppose
this rule. If anything, the rule is a guide that can and should easily
be broken for the sake of other benefits. Even Apple's own Pages has 29
menu items in a single menu.
See also:
https://uxmyths.com/post/931925744/myth-23-choices-should-always-be-limited-to-seven
Also, while avoiding long menus (or any longish list) is a good idea in
general, the means by which it is done seems to be important too.
Creating submenus with very many items might not be the best choice
(even according to the rules above). Neither seems it to be LyX's method
of hiding items (in main menus):
"Gray out any unavailable options instead of removing them: any items
that cannot be selected should remain in view. [...]
If disabled items are removed, the interface loses spatial consistency
and becomes harder to learn
[https://www.nngroup.com/articles/power-law-learning/].";
https://www.nngroup.com/articles/drop-down-menus/
Best wishes,
Daniel
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