Pull-Down Menus: Out of Sight, Out of Mind

This second front-line report from the GUI revolution focuses on a particularly wily cryptodesign foe: pull-down menus. Recall our definition of the developer's eternal foe: cryptodesign. These are decisions that worked for certain situations, but are often misapplied in different, inappropriate situations. pull-downs are the "guerilla" combatants of GUI design – so named because at one glance they look like good-guy civilians, but in another moment, they've wreaked havoc on ease-of-use. Let's explore how to neutralize these design sapper bombers.

PULL-DOWNS ARISE FROM A METAPHOR Where do pull-downs come from? What is their raison d'etre? The good-guy civilian persona for pull-downs arises from their stalwart role in our word processors, spreadsheets, and our drawing tools. pull-downs resolutely support GUI applications that require large empty areas on the screen! In document processing, drawing, and spreadsheeting (!) pull-downs support a metaphor--namely the blank page. It's the tabula rosa for your creative work. To provide space, we hide commands from view under pull-downs. Yes, we don't mind the extra visual, intellectual, memory, and motor work that pull-downs require. Because in return we get a lot of nice, clean, empty screen real estate.

CRYPTO PULL-DOWNS SNEAK ATTACK The guerrilla persona of pull-downs sneaks into the works when we forget that the blank page is a metaphor. Obviously, a blank page is not appropriate for every application.

Yet, we have seen many corporate data-entry applications open up with a "blank" first screen! The sneak attack starts here. The developer and product manager must have decided that pull-downs should be used regardless of the task. Why else would we ever start with a blank screen? Look at the extra work: to get started, the user must access the File pull-down option, then access the Open option to get going. We just got sapper bombed! Cryptodesign infiltrated and did its nasty work.

That was just the beginning. In most corporate data entry or data viewing applications, pull-downs make navigation difficult. For example, an international firm called us in after suffering a competitive beating because clients got lost in their pull-down menu structure. Their users were highly paid stock traders who used their PC to locate and follow real-time stock prices. And they didn't want to take time to "learn" the application--they were too busy making money. Cryptodesign easily did its nasty stuff. Here's how.

In the heat of work, users had to chose from six major functions for the application, selecting one from the left-most pull-down menu (Activities). Certain other menubar names changed according to the current Activity selection (see Table 1). Did users get confused? You bet. It felt like operating a slot machine; each of the six Activity options displayed a different menubar of cherries, apples, and dumbbells, etc. in no easily predictable fashion. Even worse, note that pull-down options under the Choices and Setup pull-downs changed from one Activity to the other, even though the menubar names remained the same. Users asked "how do I get back to where I was?" They had forgotten how they created the menus they had just used. The application placed significant demands on memorizing the relationships among the menu and pull-down options.