From kde-usability Sun Aug 10 16:46:13 2003 From: Charles de Miramon Date: Sun, 10 Aug 2003 16:46:13 +0000 To: kde-usability Subject: Re: Recents apps in KDE menu confusing for users. X-MARC-Message: https://marc.info/?l=kde-usability&m=106053403111704 Le Dimanche 10 Août 2003 15:46, Waldo Bastian a écrit : I think your solution is more a temporary one than a definitive one, it would be much better to have the information on a vertical colored label on the left of the tree. It would add a level to the tree of the KMenu but with what the usability experts call a 'fish-eye' effect. I'm learning their jargon ;-) The fish-eye effect is very fashionable with usability people, but I don't know if it is technically feasible in QT/KDE. I've found this interesting usability study on the Net about experiments how fast people find a node in a tree depending of the shape and the depth of the tree. http://psychology.wichita.edu/surl/usabilitynews/42/hypertext.htm The result is that people are not like computers and don't like well-balanced trees but navigate faster in flatter (2 or 3 levels) trees even if it means having more nodes at each level. The conclusion is that the KMenu is well designed, better than for example the Windows 98 menu which has more levels of depth (4) and is therefore slower to navigate. Nevertheless, my belief is that the maximum number of nodes people are confortable at a level of a tree should mimick the habit of reading in Western culture. A nicely typed in-8° book (not a cheap and crammed pocket book) has more or less 30 lines per page. The first level of the KMenu shouldn't grow more than 30 lines. With your addition the KMenu has 31 lines. If you add special lines for distribution (like the Mandrake's one) plus the Task-Oriented Menu that lays in Aaron's fertile mind, we will climb easily to 40 lines and have a mess, specially on smaller screens. As a rule of thumb, I would like to plead to keep a KMenu (at least in the standard configuration) with a maximum of 3 levels of depth and a maximum of 30 lines on the first level. Cheers, Charles -- cmiramon@kde-france.org http://www.kde-france.org _______________________________________________ kde-usability mailing list kde-usability@mail.kde.org http://mail.kde.org/mailman/listinfo/kde-usability