10 ms·

Apple studied this back in the 1980s. This is why the menubar is at the top of the screen. What they found was, people were able to, much more quickly and accu

by nirvana 15y ago

Apple studied this back in the 1980s. This is why the menubar is at the top of the screen. What they found was, people were able to, much more quickly and accurately, pick the menu item they wanted, because they didn't have to be as precise in their targeting when the menu was at the top of the screen than on the window. If you've grown up with poor copies of the Mac UI (like Windows) then you're used to targeting menu items on a window, and you don't realize that you're slower at it. But you are. It's a lot like the one button mouse issue. People think its worse when they've always had to suffer with 2 button mice.

WayneDB 15y ago
If you've grown up using the poorly crafted Mac OS interface, you probably don't realize that almost everything else is slower, despite that one really fast menu access (by mouse only). However, I can Alt-Tab to an app and bring up it's main menu (and hunt through the menu) with only the keyboard. You just can't do that on the Mac. There's a reason most other desktop systems copy the much more logical Windows style instead of the illogical Mac OS style.
- chc 15y ago
  The reason most desktop systems copy Windows is simply because Windows is the dominant desktop OS. Similarly, most desktop GUIs ape Windows' white cursor rather than the Mac's black cursor and tile desktop icons from the left rather than the right.
- undees 15y ago
  On the Mac, you can Cmd-Tab to an app and then hit Ctrl-F2 to navigate the menu from the keyboard: http://support.apple.com/kb/ht1343 http://support.apple.com/kb/ht1343 I concede that this doesn't address other objections to a single menu bar, such as identifying the active window / application.
- Cushman 15y ago
  Because the Windows GUI is based on intuition, and the Mac GUI is based on science?
ajross 15y ago
Apple studied this on a 512x342 1-bit display, on a machine architecturally incapable of multitasking more than one app at a time. It's just not relevant anymore, sorry. The ease of aiming is a real effect, but lost on a 1920x1080 display. And the usability disaster of trying to figure out which of the three "main" windows is in the foreground (and thus owns the menu) is something that was not studied, nor accounted for by Apple in the 80's.
- SimHacker 15y ago
  The effect is not lost at all. It's Fitts's Law: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fitts%27s_law http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fitts%27s_law -- the Mile High Menu Bar is still a mile high on a 1920x1080 display. http://joelonsoftware.com/uibook/chapters/fog0000000063.html http://joelonsoftware.com/uibook/chapters/fog0000000063.html
  - CamperBob 15y ago
    Fitts's law (often cited as Fitts' law) is a model of human movement primarily used in human–computer interaction and ergonomics that predicts that the time required to rapidly move to a target area is a function of the distance to the target and the size of the target How does that do anything but confirm the GP's point, that it's dumb to place a menu bar potentially thousands of pixels away from the window it applies to?
    - SimHacker 15y ago
      Because Fitts's law relates both the target size and the target distance to the speed and accuracy of hitting the target. Not just the target distance. You can move the mouse very quickly to cover the large distance, without worrying about the accuracy, thus reducing the negative contribution of the distance, because the target size is practically infinite. The target area of the menu bar at the top of the screen extends infinitely up above the screen, because when your mouse hits the edge, it stops moving and stays in the target. Try it yourself. It's EXTREMELY easy to move the cursor to the top of the screen, no matter how far away it is. The distance doesn't matter, because the target size overwhelms it. That's what is meant by the "Mile High Menu Bar" -- calling it a mile high is an understatement! This is also why pie menus have improved time and error rates over linear menus: linear menu targets are very small, and increasing distances away from the cursor, but the pie menu items all start out adjacent to the cursor, and extend all the way out to the screen edge, so you can trade off increased distance of movement for increased target size. The target area of the pie-slice shaped wedges get wider and wider as you move out further away from the menu center. (I don't mean they dynamically change size as you move, I mean that as you move out, you're in a much larger part of the slice. So with a four-item pie menu, each target area gets about 1/4 of the screen real estate, and you can keep moving the mouse even further when you hit the edge and still be in the same target slice.) Pie menus also minimize the distance, but around the center, the targets are at their smallest, but you can always move out further to get more "leverage" and directional accuracy.
Androsynth 15y ago
Can you explain why the one button mouse is better than the 2 button mouse? One of my pet peeves with Mac is that my magic mouse takes 2 clicks and a mouse movement to open a new tab in my browser, as opposed to 1 click of the scroll wheel on a pc. (Plus I have to waste a mental thread wondering if its going to register it as a primary or secondary click.) Usually when I find something on the mac annoying unusable, I blame it on Industrial Design. As in, 'boy the magic mouse really hurts my hand after a while and the secondary click is difficult to use, but it really looks great (the finger scroll is really why I use it fyi)' or 'boy my macbook cuts sharply into my wrists in a just-about-but-not-quite painful way, but damn that unibody is sleek'. I always just assumed the 1 button mouse (specifically the magic mouse) came about because it just looks so good.
- deleted 15y ago
  [deleted]
- ovi256 15y ago
  You can configure a Magic Mouse to emulate middle buttons using MagicPrefs. It's a pretty useful add-on.
  - gcb 15y ago
    i will still take the tactile feedback of real buttons.
- nirvana 15y ago
  Apple does studies for these things. They studied multi-button mice and found it slowed people down. The reason is that they clicked on the wrong button some percentage of the time. What throws people off is, when you make a mistake with a gui, you correct it and forget about it. You don't account for your time because your mind is focused on the task. But and independant observer, who observes you doing the same task in both situations will have a stopwatch and recognize objectively which takes longer. In some cases-- such as people's preferences for keyboards over mousing-- they perceive that they are faster accomplishing tasks with the keyboard than the mouse. They think this because they press keys faster and the brain accounts for each key press as a bit of an accomplishment... but the stopwatch shows differently. Its the same thing with the second button mouse. Trackpads have changed the situation, as a more direct form of control, 2, 3 finger gestures take less cognition. And of course, millions of people prefer 2 button mice, and don't care if they lose a minute or two each day as a result. So, while there is a reason for the choices Apple makes, those reasons can be less significant over time. But my point was, there is always a reason, and you shouldn't try to cut new ground unless you understand the reason for the original method.
bluedanieru 15y ago
It isn't the 80's anymore. People often have more than a single window visible on the screen. Refocusing to that window before hitting the menu is a waste of time, and especially aggravating and confusing if you forget. But again, my main gripe is simply that, right or wrong, having the broad functionality of the window embedded in the window is what people are used to, and what a designer will have in his mind when putting it together, and old habits die hard. I suspect that if you were to conduct that same experiment with current and prospective users of Unity, you would not get the same results
- deleted 15y ago
  [deleted]
- SimHacker 15y ago
  He is specifically referring to the Mile High Menu Bar: http://joelonsoftware.com/uibook/chapters/fog0000000063.html http://joelonsoftware.com/uibook/chapters/fog0000000063.html -- and explicitly contrasting that with Windows which does not have a menu bar at the top of the screen, but instead puts menus at the top of windows, which can be anywhere on the screen, as opposed to always at the top. The Windows equivalent is the Mile Deep Task Bar, which is always at the bottom of the screen. Read up on Fitts's Law: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fitts%27s_law http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fitts%27s_law
redthrowaway 15y ago
>It's a lot like the one button mouse issue. People think its worse when they've always had to suffer with 2 button mice. It is objectively worse. Cmd-clicking or two-finger-clicking is a pain in the ass. Many things become more annoying on osx simply because of the one button policy. OSX is generally nicer to use than windows, but it's hardly perfect and there are some things it just plain gets wrong.
bane 15y ago
Both of your examples are definitely worse on OS X than on basically every other OS in existence. And as proof, OS X is slowly but surely moving in the direction away from at least one of those, and I'd bet that within two or three revs of OS X away from both. Menus just aren't that hard to hit otherwise all clickable items in a program should be on a screen edge. In fact, according to Fitts's law, they should be jammed into the corners of the screen since that's even easier to hit than a screen edge. But they aren't because it's not that hard for anybody who's bothered to use a pointing device in the last 20 years. More important than that, trackpads are becoming the de facto pointing device on Apple sold computers and Fitts's law works differently on a pad vs. a moving device like a mouse. The edge of the touch surface is the infinite target, not the screen. Since touch devices are not 1:1 mapped to screen area, all clickable interfaces should be at the edge of the pad relative to wherever the cursor starts. Likewise, a second mouse button turns out to have been a great idea, so great that decades later Apple guarantees that they not only support right mouse buttons, but their default mouse not only ships with support for it, but they even have managed to cram a touchpad into it and their trackpad recognizes a two finger tap as a right-click. Why? Because decades into the great GUI experiment it finally dawned on somebody that interface complexity requires more than one button -- otherwise half of your interface gets buried behind a modifier button (or two or three) or a pile of menus and your sole button. I've watched many dozens of users move to OS X and one of the first things they ask is "why is the menu bar way the hell over there?" -- with pointing to the top of the screen (or to an entirely different monitor depending) usually preceded by a series of questions about how to do some function that is clearly on the menu bar, but since it's not coupled to the actual program window, they assume it has a decoupled function from the program and don't realize what they are looking for is there. It's an embarrassingly repeatable user interface experiment that's left me convinced that the only reason it's still part of the OS is to differentiate OS X from Windows. Physically decoupling software interfaces from the software is almost always a bad GUI idea if you can help it. It repeatedly confused users, particularly new users. It's like putting the steering wheel of your car in your house, and the gas pedal in your back yard shed. Everything from MDI to full screen apps are now slowly creeping into OS X because time and time again it's shown that users find those alternatives more usable than the old Apple way standby. Lets stop tooting this "everything Apple does in UI is best" horn. Lots of stuff Apple does in UI is great, it's even the best, these things are simply not.
wnight 15y ago
The mile-high toolbar thing is right - a target at the side/corner of the mouse catchment area is easier to hit than a target you have to navigate to stop inside. But this is only right because no usability metric is attached at this point. If the mouse-button story were just that it takes some milliseconds longer to click a control when there are two, then yes. Likely it does. But you go farther to attach usability claims to it and that's where you become wrong. For one, the one-button mouse thing was tested on people who aren't used to it. Maybe it takes a few days to get the hang of but it's not the kind of thing where someone who knows what they're doing hits the wrong button. And even if it were more than microseconds slower for the base physical action, it gets more done in that time. You have to set down your drink and reach for the keyboard with your other hand and I've already right-clicked and am done. Without knowing out workloads you can't make blanket statements like that, and I think that almost anyone could benefit from using more complex control, and macroing, etc, but only once they have a solid understanding of the thing they're trying to do. "Had to suffer with 2-button mice." Hilarious. Stockholm syndrome.

by nirvana 15y ago

WayneDB 15y ago

If you've grown up using the poorly crafted Mac OS interface, you probably don't realize that almost everything else is slower, despite that one really fast menu access (by mouse only). However, I can Alt-Tab to an app and bring up it's main menu (and hunt through the menu) with only the keyboard. You just can't do that on the Mac. There's a reason most other desktop systems copy the much more logical Windows style instead of the illogical Mac OS style.

chc 15y ago
The reason most desktop systems copy Windows is simply because Windows is the dominant desktop OS. Similarly, most desktop GUIs ape Windows' white cursor rather than the Mac's black cursor and tile desktop icons from the left rather than the right.
undees 15y ago
On the Mac, you can Cmd-Tab to an app and then hit Ctrl-F2 to navigate the menu from the keyboard: http://support.apple.com/kb/ht1343 http://support.apple.com/kb/ht1343 I concede that this doesn't address other objections to a single menu bar, such as identifying the active window / application.
Cushman 15y ago
Because the Windows GUI is based on intuition, and the Mac GUI is based on science?

ajross 15y ago

Apple studied this on a 512x342 1-bit display, on a machine architecturally incapable of multitasking more than one app at a time. It's just not relevant anymore, sorry. The ease of aiming is a real effect, but lost on a 1920x1080 display. And the usability disaster of trying to figure out which of the three "main" windows is in the foreground (and thus owns the menu) is something that was not studied, nor accounted for by Apple in the 80's.

SimHacker 15y ago
The effect is not lost at all. It's Fitts's Law: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fitts%27s_law http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fitts%27s_law -- the Mile High Menu Bar is still a mile high on a 1920x1080 display. http://joelonsoftware.com/uibook/chapters/fog0000000063.html http://joelonsoftware.com/uibook/chapters/fog0000000063.html
- CamperBob 15y ago
  Fitts's law (often cited as Fitts' law) is a model of human movement primarily used in human–computer interaction and ergonomics that predicts that the time required to rapidly move to a target area is a function of the distance to the target and the size of the target How does that do anything but confirm the GP's point, that it's dumb to place a menu bar potentially thousands of pixels away from the window it applies to?
  - SimHacker 15y ago
    Because Fitts's law relates both the target size and the target distance to the speed and accuracy of hitting the target. Not just the target distance. You can move the mouse very quickly to cover the large distance, without worrying about the accuracy, thus reducing the negative contribution of the distance, because the target size is practically infinite. The target area of the menu bar at the top of the screen extends infinitely up above the screen, because when your mouse hits the edge, it stops moving and stays in the target. Try it yourself. It's EXTREMELY easy to move the cursor to the top of the screen, no matter how far away it is. The distance doesn't matter, because the target size overwhelms it. That's what is meant by the "Mile High Menu Bar" -- calling it a mile high is an understatement! This is also why pie menus have improved time and error rates over linear menus: linear menu targets are very small, and increasing distances away from the cursor, but the pie menu items all start out adjacent to the cursor, and extend all the way out to the screen edge, so you can trade off increased distance of movement for increased target size. The target area of the pie-slice shaped wedges get wider and wider as you move out further away from the menu center. (I don't mean they dynamically change size as you move, I mean that as you move out, you're in a much larger part of the slice. So with a four-item pie menu, each target area gets about 1/4 of the screen real estate, and you can keep moving the mouse even further when you hit the edge and still be in the same target slice.) Pie menus also minimize the distance, but around the center, the targets are at their smallest, but you can always move out further to get more "leverage" and directional accuracy.

Androsynth 15y ago

Can you explain why the one button mouse is better than the 2 button mouse? One of my pet peeves with Mac is that my magic mouse takes 2 clicks and a mouse movement to open a new tab in my browser, as opposed to 1 click of the scroll wheel on a pc. (Plus I have to waste a mental thread wondering if its going to register it as a primary or secondary click.) Usually when I find something on the mac annoying unusable, I blame it on Industrial Design. As in, 'boy the magic mouse really hurts my hand after a while and the secondary click is difficult to use, but it really looks great (the finger scroll is really why I use it fyi)' or 'boy my macbook cuts sharply into my wrists in a just-about-but-not-quite painful way, but damn that unibody is sleek'. I always just assumed the 1 button mouse (specifically the magic mouse) came about because it just looks so good.

deleted 15y ago
[deleted]
ovi256 15y ago
You can configure a Magic Mouse to emulate middle buttons using MagicPrefs. It's a pretty useful add-on.
- gcb 15y ago
  i will still take the tactile feedback of real buttons.
nirvana 15y ago
Apple does studies for these things. They studied multi-button mice and found it slowed people down. The reason is that they clicked on the wrong button some percentage of the time. What throws people off is, when you make a mistake with a gui, you correct it and forget about it. You don't account for your time because your mind is focused on the task. But and independant observer, who observes you doing the same task in both situations will have a stopwatch and recognize objectively which takes longer. In some cases-- such as people's preferences for keyboards over mousing-- they perceive that they are faster accomplishing tasks with the keyboard than the mouse. They think this because they press keys faster and the brain accounts for each key press as a bit of an accomplishment... but the stopwatch shows differently. Its the same thing with the second button mouse. Trackpads have changed the situation, as a more direct form of control, 2, 3 finger gestures take less cognition. And of course, millions of people prefer 2 button mice, and don't care if they lose a minute or two each day as a result. So, while there is a reason for the choices Apple makes, those reasons can be less significant over time. But my point was, there is always a reason, and you shouldn't try to cut new ground unless you understand the reason for the original method.

bluedanieru 15y ago

It isn't the 80's anymore. People often have more than a single window visible on the screen. Refocusing to that window before hitting the menu is a waste of time, and especially aggravating and confusing if you forget. But again, my main gripe is simply that, right or wrong, having the broad functionality of the window embedded in the window is what people are used to, and what a designer will have in his mind when putting it together, and old habits die hard. I suspect that if you were to conduct that same experiment with current and prospective users of Unity, you would not get the same results

deleted 15y ago
[deleted]
SimHacker 15y ago
He is specifically referring to the Mile High Menu Bar: http://joelonsoftware.com/uibook/chapters/fog0000000063.html http://joelonsoftware.com/uibook/chapters/fog0000000063.html -- and explicitly contrasting that with Windows which does not have a menu bar at the top of the screen, but instead puts menus at the top of windows, which can be anywhere on the screen, as opposed to always at the top. The Windows equivalent is the Mile Deep Task Bar, which is always at the bottom of the screen. Read up on Fitts's Law: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fitts%27s_law http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fitts%27s_law

redthrowaway 15y ago

>It's a lot like the one button mouse issue. People think its worse when they've always had to suffer with 2 button mice. It is objectively worse. Cmd-clicking or two-finger-clicking is a pain in the ass. Many things become more annoying on osx simply because of the one button policy. OSX is generally nicer to use than windows, but it's hardly perfect and there are some things it just plain gets wrong.

bane 15y ago

Both of your examples are definitely worse on OS X than on basically every other OS in existence. And as proof, OS X is slowly but surely moving in the direction away from at least one of those, and I'd bet that within two or three revs of OS X away from both. Menus just aren't that hard to hit otherwise all clickable items in a program should be on a screen edge. In fact, according to Fitts's law, they should be jammed into the corners of the screen since that's even easier to hit than a screen edge. But they aren't because it's not that hard for anybody who's bothered to use a pointing device in the last 20 years. More important than that, trackpads are becoming the de facto pointing device on Apple sold computers and Fitts's law works differently on a pad vs. a moving device like a mouse. The edge of the touch surface is the infinite target, not the screen. Since touch devices are not 1:1 mapped to screen area, all clickable interfaces should be at the edge of the pad relative to wherever the cursor starts. Likewise, a second mouse button turns out to have been a great idea, so great that decades later Apple guarantees that they not only support right mouse buttons, but their default mouse not only ships with support for it, but they even have managed to cram a touchpad into it and their trackpad recognizes a two finger tap as a right-click. Why? Because decades into the great GUI experiment it finally dawned on somebody that interface complexity requires more than one button -- otherwise half of your interface gets buried behind a modifier button (or two or three) or a pile of menus and your sole button. I've watched many dozens of users move to OS X and one of the first things they ask is "why is the menu bar way the hell over there?" -- with pointing to the top of the screen (or to an entirely different monitor depending) usually preceded by a series of questions about how to do some function that is clearly on the menu bar, but since it's not coupled to the actual program window, they assume it has a decoupled function from the program and don't realize what they are looking for is there. It's an embarrassingly repeatable user interface experiment that's left me convinced that the only reason it's still part of the OS is to differentiate OS X from Windows. Physically decoupling software interfaces from the software is almost always a bad GUI idea if you can help it. It repeatedly confused users, particularly new users. It's like putting the steering wheel of your car in your house, and the gas pedal in your back yard shed. Everything from MDI to full screen apps are now slowly creeping into OS X because time and time again it's shown that users find those alternatives more usable than the old Apple way standby. Lets stop tooting this "everything Apple does in UI is best" horn. Lots of stuff Apple does in UI is great, it's even the best, these things are simply not.

wnight 15y ago

The mile-high toolbar thing is right - a target at the side/corner of the mouse catchment area is easier to hit than a target you have to navigate to stop inside. But this is only right because no usability metric is attached at this point. If the mouse-button story were just that it takes some milliseconds longer to click a control when there are two, then yes. Likely it does. But you go farther to attach usability claims to it and that's where you become wrong. For one, the one-button mouse thing was tested on people who aren't used to it. Maybe it takes a few days to get the hang of but it's not the kind of thing where someone who knows what they're doing hits the wrong button. And even if it were more than microseconds slower for the base physical action, it gets more done in that time. You have to set down your drink and reach for the keyboard with your other hand and I've already right-clicked and am done. Without knowing out workloads you can't make blanket statements like that, and I think that almost anyone could benefit from using more complex control, and macroing, etc, but only once they have a solid understanding of the thing they're trying to do. "Had to suffer with 2-button mice." Hilarious. Stockholm syndrome.