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I'm curious about the hierarchy one. On one hand, it seems like a good rule, because one of the hallmarks of a dense, hard-to-use UI is the presence of deep opt

I'm curious about the hierarchy one. On one hand, it seems like a good rule, because one of the hallmarks of a dense, hard-to-use UI is the presence of deep option trees. On the other hand, there is ALWAYS complexity in something large enough, and it cannot be abstracted away, best we hope for is to organize it well -- and hierarchies are a natural way of doing that. A good middle ground that I've seen across programs, apps and OS-level menus is to add a search box that "skips" the hierarchy navigation when the user knows what they're looking for. Another interesting idea was "adaptive" menus where the most used options (per user) would be "nearest" / easiest to get to. That one is nice in theory, but in practice it causes things to move around, and makes it harder to develop familiarity with the nested menus. On the point of familiarity: a solution that appears clever and great, but hasn't taken off (probably because it still feels "unusual") is the circle menu. It makes good use of muscle memory, as all the options are arranged in concentric rings around a start point, with selection on one ring opening the next (more outer) ring with more options. As far as the author's suggestion -- I guess it aims to keep the top-level menus simple. Where does the complexity go? If it's boxed away in some other dialog, per "category" or "subject", it could work relatively well. A bit more effort from the designers to make it that way, but generally that means it's less effort for the user to interact with.

notatoad 4y ago
i don't think there's a good answer on the hierarchy problem. there's two types of users - the ones who like to see all the settings available to them, and the ones who get angry or confused if any settings are displayed that aren't relevant to them. these two groups of users will never agree on what settings should be visible and what should be hidden.
deltarholamda 4y ago
>A good middle ground that I've seen across programs, apps and OS-level menus is to add a search box that "skips" the hierarchy navigation I use this in the iOS Settings all the time. It truly is a great and important UI element. Web sites could benefit from adopting this as well. With the rise of Google, it seemed like everybody just kind of gave up on search. "They'll just Google it anyway." But for a lot of Web sites, having a decent and working search tool is really important. I remember a lot of articles talking about how to handle search on your Web site, with lots of tools and libraries and whatnot, and it just kind of dried up. There's still work happening on Big Time search technologies (Lucene, et. al.), but other than built-in things for platforms like Wordpress, it's kind of stale and quiet.
Izkata 4y ago
> A good middle ground that I've seen across programs, apps and OS-level menus is to add a search box that "skips" the hierarchy navigation when the user knows what they're looking for. Or, when searching, keep the hierarchy but only show the items that match and their parent folders. Can give users a sense of "oh, that's over there, so similar stuff is in that same location".

notatoad 4y ago

i don't think there's a good answer on the hierarchy problem. there's two types of users - the ones who like to see all the settings available to them, and the ones who get angry or confused if any settings are displayed that aren't relevant to them. these two groups of users will never agree on what settings should be visible and what should be hidden.

deltarholamda 4y ago

>A good middle ground that I've seen across programs, apps and OS-level menus is to add a search box that "skips" the hierarchy navigation I use this in the iOS Settings all the time. It truly is a great and important UI element. Web sites could benefit from adopting this as well. With the rise of Google, it seemed like everybody just kind of gave up on search. "They'll just Google it anyway." But for a lot of Web sites, having a decent and working search tool is really important. I remember a lot of articles talking about how to handle search on your Web site, with lots of tools and libraries and whatnot, and it just kind of dried up. There's still work happening on Big Time search technologies (Lucene, et. al.), but other than built-in things for platforms like Wordpress, it's kind of stale and quiet.

Izkata 4y ago

> A good middle ground that I've seen across programs, apps and OS-level menus is to add a search box that "skips" the hierarchy navigation when the user knows what they're looking for. Or, when searching, keep the hierarchy but only show the items that match and their parent folders. Can give users a sense of "oh, that's over there, so similar stuff is in that same location".