On Sun, Nov 03, 2002 at 07:52:09AM -0600, Igor Izyumin wrote:
On Sunday 03 November 2002 03:09 am, Dimitrie O. Paun wrote:
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:
- Just two levels
- The more some info is accessed, the fewer mouse clicks should be required to get to it.
- Menus organized by usage patterns, rather then strict technical category.
I agree with the first two, but the third is wrong. Information should not be split up into illogical categories based on what you think is a logical usage pattern. The fewer splits you can make, the better it is. If I'm looking for a FAQ, I would first click on Documentation, but if it's buried in "Support" I would not even bother clicking there. The best structure would have clear, logical categories and you would not have to guess where a certain document would be buried. Keep in mind that it is better to group all information into as few logical categories as possible. There should be no guessing involved.
Agreeing 100%.
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.
OK, this section needs to be renamed, too. 'contribute' is a transitive verb, and in a context of a free software project implies contributing code. A web guru would never click on a "contribute" link because they think it's instructions for sending in Wine patches. "Help out" or "Volunteer" or something like that would be much more accurate.
Great idea ! Contribute is in fact not "aggressive" enough, as it hides what the intentions behind that are.