Do you already really read what there stand in your menus ?
Let's have a look at some populars (or not) applications in the Gnome desktop.
You do not see anything disturbing ? Something wrong ? Well, we have (nearly always) File, Edit and View menu. But is it relevant ? In many cases, it is not.
In plenty applications, the menus are implementation oriented and not user/document centered. What I mean is that the user generally do not care of what the program with technicaly do, he care of the effects, the results of his action. By example, he want to save his document to do not loose his all-day work. He do not care of what the text editor will do (get the buffer, open a file, drink a cola, write in a buffer, wait a moment, flush the file on the disk...).
Generally we do not read what there is in the title of the menu. Often, we have an approch in 6 steps :
- Remember where is this fuck*ng functionnality used yesterday
- Click on every menu and carefully check all items in the submenu
- Do not find what you are looking for
- Recheck all menus
- Find what you are looking for
- Store in your brain where this functionnality remains and also, remember the keyboard shortcut
What if we could have an approch with less step than the previous approch:
- Read title of menu
- Locate the right menu at the first time
- Find the functionnality in this menu easily and quickly
The movie player
In the Movie Player, we do not have File menu but we have a Movie menu instead. Yeah, it is better ! I do not mind if my movie is a file or not, what I'm looking for is something related to what I'm doing now , watching a movie. Not something about the stuff implementing what I want enventually to do. But, next menu is Edit. If we think a bit about this menu, we should think
Oh, cool dude, I can edit my movies in Totem.
No, you're wrong, you can't !
But, the menu ...
Forget the title, just click and see what you can really do !
The terminal
Thoose menus are really awfull, how can we write so badly designed menus ? There is nothing right with thoose menus. We have a file menu, but which file are speaking about ? Same thing with Edit.
The web browser
In the web browser we also have thoose menu. But, again, I do not care about files. The actions I would like to do refer to the webpage I'm visiting. I can detail each applications in my desktop but I do not think it is the right thing to do. You understand what I mean and that what I precisely want.
Next
But what if we redesign the menu with a different label ? There is many different approch we can have to make the user experience with his desktop better
Should gnome have a lisa bar ? And you, what do you think ? Do you read your menu ? Do you also find that the menu are often brainfucked ?