Streamlined menu bar / toolbar (mockup included)

[pior_o]

Hello all.

Pardon me if the following has been brought up already. I did find a thread about icon resizing, but no entry covering this specific suggestion :

I think there is a need for an optional version of the menu bar, with a more streamlined look. I do understand the thinking behind the current design (showing a listing of all menu headers + offering a direct link to an often used command + some space for user placed icons), but this design seems to have a few shortcomings. 

- With the icons being so visually dominant, the menu headers (workspace selection / create /modify / and so on) end up being given a secondary role whereas they should be primary.

- I understand that the topmost icons represent an often used menu item rather than the menu category as a whole, but having two fonctions (menu header dropdown + an arbitrary, specific command from that menu) visually merged into one visual entity is somewhat confusing.

- The text headers are very vertically very thin, causing missed clicks.

From there I think that it would be beneficial to offer a streamlined mode as an option. Here is a mockup :

On top of clearing up some screen real estate I actually tend to find this kind of very simple menu faster to read, because the eye can scan text faster than colorful icons. (now don't get me wrong, I do find such icons useful when it comes to explaining quickly what a given tool does, but that's a bit of a different purpose than the one of a menu bar, which is to organize tools/commands by category).

Of course I understand that the menu bar shown in that mockup had been customized, showing more icons than in its default state. And I also understand that even the default icons can be removed, which is exactly what I have on my setup :

But I think that the idea of an optional text-only menu still stands, if only for the purpose of making the menu headers taller thus preventing missed clicks while still saving screen real estate. I actually feel like simple text-based menus like these are more inviting to new users because they "throw in" less visual information than colorful thumbnails.

I hope this makes sense ! I am personally quite happy with the current solultion of the user manually removing the top icons as shown above, but maybe this can lead to interesting discussions about UI streamlining in general. Let me know what you think.

P

[Anonymous]

I don't know if this is the best solution but the toolbar is really too big and dominates the display so something should be done. A few other suggestions:

1) Let the user choose text-only, icon-only, or both.

2) Allow the toolbar to be locked up at the top of the window where there is unused space.

3) A one-key shortcut to hide-show the toolbar instead of CTL-ALT-W. Maybe a function key?

4) Instead of the confusing way of getting last-used: Just put the last used tool at the top of the menu so that the mouse pointer is already over it after the icon (or menu name) is clicked. Then two quick clicks in the same place get the last-used tool.

[pior_o]

Thank you for you contribution mwoll. Without a doubt there is work to be done on this toolbar. The concept of a "ribbon" (first added to 3DSMax shortly after MS introduced the concept in Office, around 2009 or so if I remember correctly) is probably popular amongst new users, but power users generally tend to dislike that sort of widget since they are used to relying on custom keymaps and on-screen popup menus showing up right under the mouse pointer for all their needs. Being able to disable or at least streamline the ribbon toolbar would be a step in the right direction.

I had no idea about ctrl-alt-w being the shortcut to disable it. This is actually a surprising choice for a key binding, as ctrl-w is used to close documents in some applications. Thank you for pointing this out, as I wouldn't have expected such a rarely used feature to have a shortcut (no real point in it, since whoever uses that would only need it once). That said, ironically enough I personally cant see myself hiding it anyways because disabling the "ribbon" also disables the top menus, which does not make sense if there is no way to defines one's custom tool shortcuts in the first place. The S menu is getting there, but still not as fast as custom shortcuts would be.

Besides that, there is a definite bug with the ribbon in its current state. In my earlier post I mentionned that I manually streamlined the toolbar by removing the default icons, thus making the toolbar text-only. However it turns out that such a customization is ignored by the program, as every menu category stripped down of all its icons reverts to its default icon after restart. Of course I understand that error prevention in paramount for any UX, but in this case this is more of a case of an application actively dismissing input from the user. As shown here :

(That said, as much as I would like this toolbar to be improved, fully customizable key bindings for tool shortcuts and navigation is probably more important at this time.)

[colin.smith]

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