GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 94112
Reconsider Panel Menus
Last modified: 2015-03-24 13:01:17 UTC
I'm marking this as sort of a tracker bug for all the panel menu proposals etc. Also, I wouldn't mind just moving some of the discussion here as well. I'll add dependecies etc.
some ideas from other bugs: bug 75312 - Menu panel should have a help menu I agree with this bug 81545 - Task oriented menu names Good idea, but has desktop wide impact that is going to require alot of thought. bug 89874 - "Actions" menu should be named "Desktop" Generally probably a good idea considering the current design. bug 92719 - Desktop Preferences should be a top level menu I pretty much agree with this.
Dave: don't forget #84555. We need to consider how the context menus for the menus work (and whether we want them at all). Also #94120 - the Actions menu should be editable
Just wanted to add a few(many) quick(ended up not being so quick) comments here about a couple issues we need to consider. 1. How many top level menus are acceptable for the panel? Most apps tend to have 5 - 6 menus. Is this acceptable for the panel as well? I'm not saying that i have 5-6 possible top level menus in mind, but I could perhaps. So whats the upper limit? 2. What is the mental model of the menu panel? This is a poorly worded abstract question, but the question i'm trying to get at is should users have to understand that the menu panel is a "panel" or should it just be thought of as the menubar of the desktop, similar to the menubar of every other app window. 3. Cracked out ideas of mine that i'm just throwing out(aimed more towards the future rather than gnome2.2) It might be nice to have the equivalent of a go menu in the panel. I'll file another bug on this, but the idea is based on the premise that nautilus may move towards an object based ui rather than a navigational based ui in the future(ie no navigation in window). This is being discussed but nothing has really been decided yet. Task based menus are another idea i like(bug 81545). Task based menus basically change the language of the menus from "what tool do you want to use?" to "what do you want to do?" Typical menu entries would include "browse the web," "compose a document," etc. I'm not entirely convinced that task based menus can completely replace application based menus, as accessory apps such as the calculator don't fit in well, but I think they could provide real user benefit. 4. With this proposal what time frame are we aiming at? I have to admit some of the ideas i have in mind are a little too abstract to be considered for the gnome 2.x release cycle (ie. task based menus). This said we don't want to stagnate, so doing small incremental changes based on the current layout is definately a good idea. 5. What can we do in the short term? Moving the prefereces/settings into a top level menu would be a plus (bug 92719) as they are not applications. Given the current structure renaming "actions" to "desktop" is also probably a good idea as seth's user testing suggests. (bug 89874). Also I really like the idea of adding help to the panel menus (bug 75312), as this would create consistency between all other menubars and the "desktop" menu by putting help in a familiar place in the menu (bonus is that "gnome about" moves out of the panel context menu into the help menu = less cluttered context menu). So as I see it, potentially we could have this layout in the short term: Applications Preferences Desktop Help comments?
Personally I would like to be able to 1. Add a top-level entry for *any* menu directory/pre-defined sub menu as a top-level entry. 2. Remove any of the existing enries. 3. Do this for all panels, not just the special "menu" one. It follows from this that the menu panel shouldn't be a special case at all, which is what bug 87027 is about, more or less. A short-hand for adding the default top-level entries to a panel, or even creating a panel with "menu" entries, should perhaps also be included, though.
toralf your comments are sort of outside the scope of this bug.
Created attachment 11799 [details] mockup of a menu idea i've been working on, just looking for suggestion and peoples ideas. This is not a proposal.
The glade mockup looks pretty cool, but why are preferences in the tasks menu?
see also bug 93506, which has a discussion about popup menu.
Guys, it'd be great to work on this, so we can (finally) have a new menu layout for 2.6. Can we start talking about this again ?
I don't think we're considering a different layout for the "Applications" menu, at least not a significant change. If we want to do this for 2.6 we need to figure out not just what we should do, but who's going to do it.
There are big usability problems with adding new items (applets, etc) to gnome panels. I found one good suggestion in the bug http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=11763 It seems "Add to Panel" and "New Panel" could be added to Actions menu - because now only experienced users can add new items to panel or create new panels :( Btw, some people already reported this idea, look at bug http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=68469 Some info from Gnome Usability Test: http://developer.gnome.org/projects/gup/ut1_pres/text21.htm Testers asked users to add a clock to their system: o Specified that it had to show date and time o Didn't use word "panel", just that it had to appear beside other icons at bottom of screen results: * 1 user went directly to panel and completed task successfully * 8 users looked in the Settings menu * 3 users looked in the Control Center * One user, familiar with context menus, searched for 10 minutes before thinking to right- click on the panel And we still call Gnome Desktop user-friendly after this ?
> If we want to do this for 2.6 we need to figure out not > just what we should do, but who's going to do it. I'm willing to implement what will be decided. But I'll need some time to do the implementation, so it'd be great to know what to implement more than one week before the UI freeze.
*** Bug 157933 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
From #157933: Previous thoughts on menu layouts: http://lists.gnome.org/archives/desktop-devel-list/2004-June/msg00302.html
See bug #161613: I attached a patch and screenshots there.
Moving this to the tracker I've created and will take responsibility for updating. I've taken the feedback from this bug and other and tried to summarize into the tracker what consensus seems to exist. This bug is kind of a tracker, but also has proposals for a menu design and I'm fixing that.
Bryan: do you want to keep this bug open? I'm not sure there's really much interest in keeping yet another menu bug like this one.
Agreed, closing. Thanks!