From: Joaquin Cuenca Abela (e98cuenc@yahoo.com)
Date: Wed Aug 28 2002 - 11:06:17 EDT
--- Alan Horkan <horkana@tcd.ie> wrote:
>
>
> On Wed, 28 Aug 2002, Hubert Figuiere wrote:
>
> > Instead I propose to only include 5-8 MRU items in
> the font pulldown
> > menu (organized alphabetically, to organize by
> recency of use will
> > probably only serve to confuse), then a seperator
> then "Other Fonts..."
>
> probably?
> anything to back this up?
Yes. It's a known fact (at least by computer
interface guys) that MRU usually causes more harm than
good.
The problem is that if the menu items (or combo box
items, etc) are not fixed, the user has no
oportunities at all to *remember* where this or that
item was.
For instance, in recent versions of word, the menus
only show the most used items. More than half the
time when the menu popups I spend ~2 seconds just to
scan the list of items (one after one) just to see if
my item is already there.
When I discover that it's not there, I expand the menu
and then I rescan the whole list (usually faster,
because when the menu has its full size I know more or
less where is the item than I'm looking for)
To be honest, now I've developped a kind of "open
menu" = "click on menu item, go down to the little
arrow and expand the menu", which makes things go
faster but it's still 2-3 times slower than the old
approach.
That "feature" is just an idea to solve a real problem
(menus/combos contains too much items), but that
unfortunately doesn't work.
I like much more the Seth idea for the font list.
Maybe the list of "main" fonts should be
parametrizable by the user, but don't let the computer
change it all the time.
> Most recently used makes sense to be ordered by most
> recently used.
> how about a comparison to what Word does? If Word
> orders MRU by MRU
> which i think it does then taking a differnt
> approach really requires
> some backup.
That approach was probed to be wrong long before MS
implemented it. Everybody is still wondering why they
did it... (it works well for me when the menu is
stable enough, for instance for the "Start->Programs"
menu, but don't extrapolate it to applications menus).
Cheers,
=====
Joaquin Cuenca Abela
e98cuenc@yahoo.com
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