Rethinking Menus
One of the topics in software usability is about how to structure and label menus. I have been reading a few human-computer interaction (HCI) papers and books over the last couple of weeks, and I started thinking about how menus could be integrated in the whole user-participation web 2.0 thingy.
What about users being able to relabel and restructure menus and menu items? And allowing users to create their own menu items for certain functionalities which require a combination of different operations (like a macro)? This could help users when they are learning to use a new software, and infrequent users when they are coming back. In addition to that, we could have a ‘social network’ for menus where users can import other people’s menu items, labels, shortcuts, and functionalities, and can learn how other people are using the software.
No idea if anyone has done this before. Just had the idea, and thought it would be a cool feature.
Oh hell yea, that would be wonderful. GTK(1?) would let you remap shortcut key on the fly, if the app would enable the feature. Even being able to choose, manually, which menu items are show/hidden would be a boon. Also, think how some apps, like Firefox let you customize their toolbars. Why shouldn’t menus be the same?
| Posted 11 months, 3 weeks ago