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Eric Schaffer,
Ph.D., CPE, is CEO and Founder of Human Factors International, Inc.
He has been involved in creating and teaching software design for
more than 14 years. He can be reached by e-mail at
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John Sorflaten,
Ph.D., CPE, started out writing and directing training films and
documentaries then switched to UI design. "A screen is a screen,"
he says. He works at Human Factors International, Inc. and can be
reached by email at
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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.
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