However it is somewhat related to "search".)
I have seen two approaches to finding information, in land of software
as well as real-ware. There are people who find it themselves and
there are some who use an external agent to get what they need. Human
memory is expensive, so these are the most obvious approaches. I have
seen equal number of people on both sides.
In the first group are people who like to keep everything organized,
from physical files to computer files, books to RSS feeds, knives to
applications. Organization typically involves grouping the items into
categories and re-grouping again if the number of items in a category
grows too much. Its a pain to remember things, then there is so much
to remember. Care is taken so that the number of categories don't grow
too large or the nesting isn't too deep. Computer Science people
cashed in on such problems, analyzed them to death and presented us
with databases, shallow and deep trees, hashtables, sorting etc.
Whatever the approach, the objective remains that reaching one
particular item should take as less amount of memory and labour as
possible. Memory and labour appear as trade-off here, so there are
variations of this where the most frequently accessed items are
optimized more than others (compression, source coding, amortized
algorithms, cabinets with upper and lower shelves etc.).
The second group of people use an external agent to do this task. In
reality, not everyone belongs to only one group, people tend use
whichever approach is suitable. Anyway, the external agents could be
one's mom, secretary :), a database, a filesystem, search engine etc.
They are nothing but efficient members of the first category. The
efficiency matters here; tolerance gets extremely low if I am not
doing something but hiring someone to do it.
It is clear that when dealing with items on the start menu, the same
ideas would come into action. OK, so the rest of the post is about
start menu, you can stop reading now.
Either we have a menu, properly organized or we have a dump of
everything with an extremely efficient way to get what we want. OK, we
can do the optimized variation of the first and add search to it to
make it work for the second group (e.g. kickoff, internet with search
engine and directories, filesystem with desktop search). But to get it
done right, both should be done with precision and care. Which means,
the search has to be fast and accurate and categorization should not
be too deep nor too flat. Geeshh... that is difficult.
Actually not that difficult for applications. If done the right way,
they can be arranged in a start menu with categories (not Windows
style though!). Or they can just be there and you find them using a
search tool (quicksilver, katapult, deskbar). Or both (kickoff,
kickoff spinoffs).
This is where I found Mandriva to go wrong. They had a nice start menu
to begin with (because Mandrake had a nice start menu to begin with).
In the latest distribution, the Mandriva specific categorization has
been replaced with a two level (i.e. top-level with
network/tools/office and then apps in them) menu. Some of the submenus
became too large, and they have been put behind another nesting called
"More" (e.g. "Firefox" went behind more because it not native KDE).
The end result is a menu, which is only two level and pretty flat (so
less to remember which submenu to go to) but once in the submenu, have
to memorize the position in a pretty long vertical list. Add to that
the effort in dragging the mouse a significant vertical distance. I
have entries that requires me to drag the mouse all the way from top
(I have my start menu button at the top-right corner) to the bottom -
that's 1024 pixels. The earlier menu was the same with one more
nesting, like "Browsers", "Spreadsheet", "Terminals" where I only had
to memorize the levels and then look in the 2-3 items in each
immediate category. The vertical distance covered in the current menu
is larger than the horizontal distance due to that extra submenu.
Adding to the woes is the lack of an embedded search option.
There is another aspect with menu which make vertical movement much
harder than horizontal movement. Its related to Fitts's Law. But first
a small digression. I like to call it Fitts's Theory. Because it
describes certain operation in a particular model. Calling it law
isn't wrong, except it makes it sound like anyone not following the
"law" is from Mars. Once again, it tries to model some observed
phenomenon, and does not aim to dictate how the phenomenon should take
place. Unfortunately most commentaries about Fitts's law seem to think
we should all abide by Fitts's law or leave this planet.
Anyway, in menus the entries are horizontally layered. The menus are
designed to open a submenu when the mouse in on the corresponding
entry. The problem happens if I try to follow a straight line from an
entry to an entry in a submenu. If the entry in the submenu appears
significantly lower in the submenu, the mouse will inevitably cross
over the next entry in the menu, which will open the submenu for the
next menu entry thereby forcing you to start again. Vertical motion
isn't unrestricted. It happens to me always when I quickly try to go
from the start menu to some application whose position I know thereby
trying to go straight from the button to that entry. If I am not
careful, I end up opening the submenu of the next menu entry in a
haste, then move left and up to find the right menu entry, then move
right _carefully_ to horizontally enter the correct submenu and then
rush down to the memorized spot. All in a wink of an eye and it has
become my second nature now. But every time this happens, I feel
slightly irritated. If menus are designed to take advantage of the
horizontal freedom of movement more, it would be much smooth. Deeper
nesting has the mentioned side effect. By the way, radial menu or
submenus that open in the middle or in the first entry should be
better. But apart from a few radial Firefox context menus, I have not
found any other implementation. I love radial menu.
That is all I had to say about start menus. Before finishing, I should
point out that even for the first group of self-organized users,
having someone or something to search is not totally out of the
question. Some form of data are too vast to organize (bookmarks and
directories wrt internet), some have no single way of organizing or
some even have no of meaningful grouping criterion. And even if you
arrange all your computer files in directories, emails in mail
folders, feeds in feed reader folders, websites in bookmark folders,
if you are to find this blog (containing "Fitts's Law" but unrelated
to beagle), then good luck!
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