[thelist] Testing/suggestions wanted...

Tom Dell'Aringa pixelmech at yahoo.com
Wed Jun 19 17:39:01 CDT 2002


--- Jonathan_A_McPherson at rl.gov wrote:
> Tom,
>
> Works flawlessly in Mozilla 1.0. Apparently it's working in IE 5.5 too, so
> good job on cross-browser support.
>
> Comments:
>
> * I don't like the fact that it comes up on right-click. Many Web surfers,
> myself included, regularly use right-click on ordinary document text to go
> back, view source, download, etc. Your menu will either stop them from doing
> that, or make a real mess on the screen when both your menu and the browser
> menu come up at once.

Yeah, Tom I missed that one, and he brings up a good point about left click too..hmm. What I am
wondering is if maybe you can trigger it some other way. Ideas off the top - the [+] thing you see
for rating pages..maybe something similar or something that comes up when the mouse stops..which
has problems of its own

> * The "circular" organization of menu items looks sufficiently cool, but
> again, you're breaking a very deeply ingrained UI paradigm: in this case,
> that menu items are (pseudo)linear. If I were a user, I would be afraid to
> take my mouse off any of the boxes in the circle, because in Windows, when
> you take the mouse off a menu, it disappears.

I still think you can make it work though, if things are somehow labeled so clearly you don't
mistake it, and at some point you do get to a fairly linear list. Frankly I like to see something
different work if it could.

>
> * The "back" link should look different from the others. How are users to
> distinguish between the "Back to previous menu" link and the "Back to
> previous page" link?

Exactly.

> * Overall, it's difficult to get accustomed to the hierarchical nature of
> the menu because of its unusual shape and the fact that the previous level
> disappears as the next is displayed.

But, what's the point of even doing it then? Tom has got an interesting idea, to relegate back to
a hierarchical linear form makes it the same as everything else -- I say he continues on the line
he is at to see if he can make it work.

Tom

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