Re: C-h K and C-h F in the Help menu

[Alan Mackenzie]

Hi, Lennart!

Just sticking my oar in a bit ....

On Sun, 21 May 2006, Lennart Borgman wrote:

>Eli Zaretskii wrote:
>>> Date: Sat, 20 May 2006 23:19:02 +0200
>>> From: Lennart Borgman <address@hidden>
>>> CC:  address@hidden

>>> I recently got some comments about the help menu in CVS Emacs from a
>>> long term Emacs user and fan (+15 y usage). One of the comments were
>>> that there are too many things in the help menu.

>> For some value of ``too many'': we have 17 entries there.  Why is this
>> bad?  Each entry can be useful in specific situations.

>It is a good question. As I understand it the complaints was from a user
>interface view. Such a view is a mixture of logical and psychological
>matters. Neither a logical or a psychological argument is then entirely
>useful on its own even if they on their own are completely valid.

>At first sight one might think that the time to find something in a menu
>is proportional to the length of the menu. I think however that the time
>required rises much faster, but I have not read any research about this.
>As I said before one of the factors is probably the short term memory
>span. This means that clear grouping with horizontal lines will probably
>help (as soon as the user understands the grouping).

I think this is right.

>In the process of trying to grasp the grouping it seems to me that there
>should be a big advantage in fewer items.

>Submenus will reduce the number of items even if there is only two 
>subitems and I believe that this will be helpful for the reasons I have 
>tried to outline above.

Submenus don't reduce the number of items.  They just make some of them
invisible, thus _increasing_ search effort.  Activating a menu item when
it is hidden within a sub-menu is much slower than when it is directly
there.

A deep tree structure is fine if you're playing a dungeons and dragons
type game, but can be infuriating if you need to do a depth-first search
to find some "lost" menu item.  That's one of the main reasons I detest
most menu interfaces.

The way to reduce the number of items is to reduce the number of items.
If 17 is too many (which I can quite well believe), then categorise them
into "must have", "should have" and "nice to have", and get rid of all of
the last lot.  :-)

-- 
Alan.