On November 3, 2002 02:35 am, Francois Gouget wrote:
Too much nesting just hides information and forces the user to dig down to find what he is looking for.
I am sorry to do a AOL -- me too post, but I do agree 100% with Francois. For WineHQ, I _strongly_ feel it's a big mistake to have more than 2 levels of menus. Just top level, and a sublevel is more than enough.
Here are the principles I used for my proposal: 1. Just two levels 2. The more some info is accessed, the fewer mouse clicks should be required to get to it. 3. Menus organized by usage patterns, rather then strict technical category.
Please keep in mind that moving one item one level down in the menu hierarchy decreases its visibility by an order of magnitude, while keeping it on the higher level complicates that level only slightly.
The current menu is simple, but at the expense of making the info almost invisible! I'll give you one example: *I* (a long time Wine contributor), was aware of the status page (which I love) from the link that used to be provided in the WWN. The only way I new how to get to it was to look careful through some WWN for the little link to Status! At a certain point I could not find it anymore, I looked for it for minutes, just to give up thinking that it got deleted!!! I can continue to give examples on many pages, but if I can't get to the info, something's not right.
And a comment on usage patterns. You asked why the split between Development/Contributing, and Support/Documentation. This follows from Principle 3. They have _very_ different usage patterns, and audiences.
When a user has a problem, he goes with one click to the support area, where all the relevant info (and only that!) is available. No need to go jumping through the site, it's just another click away.
Similarly, for the Development/Contributing. Time and again OSS project push only the "Development" part in front, scarring away non-programmers from contributing, just to realize later on that they do need a lot of non-programming help as well. Case in point, instead of spending my time on the controls, I do other things that could be handled by non-programmers :). It's a natural split, the Development area is very important for Wine, and people going there are not interested in items that are listed in "Contributing"; also, we should show people there are many other ways to contribute, appart from coding. BTW, the Contributing section is is Francois idea, but I strongly support it.
Thing is, I am quite happy with the structure I put forward. Please review my desing principles, and lets see if we have any disagreement there. You must realize this is UI design, and everybody will have a different opinion. :) (So I must have mine)