Context menus are good if you know what your looking for, but what if you don’t?

I just deleted an important contact out of my mail application. There was no undo, or any other way to get them back. Why did I do it? Because I was trying to hit the second to the last menu item called ‘new card’, and instead I hit the nefarious ‘delete’. My mistake was severely punished.

Why have we gone so long resting on our ‘context menu laurels’ as a standard for quick tasks? They usually offer a variety of tasks, only a small percentage of which I use. The hit target is small, and it’s often difficult to distinguish the difference between each item. Fitz law should have a field day with those. And please don’t give me nested menus. After three cups of coffee at 1:00a.m., I’m hardly stable enough to drag the mouse so precisely as to avoid mousing out of the hot spot. What about some sort of icon or something for common tasks, like copy, paste or even my naughty friend delete?

My kingdom for a better designed context menu.

Published on March 21, 2005
Resides in User Experience

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5 Responses to “Context Menus Have Got To Go”

1. 1

   Paolo on March 21st, 2005

   I can’t stand nested menus. Especially the ones that create multiple columns of choices. Really, at this point I think it’s time to observe a three click rule. Everything that a person should need should be within a maximum of three clicks.

   Personally, I think that most mail programs need major GUI overhauls. Gmail is one of the better ones but that’s not saying much.

2. 2

   SteveC on April 7th, 2005

   Gotta love confirmation screens really.

3. 3

   Mike on April 15th, 2005

   Actually context menus are great. It’s the crappy software developers that didn’t program a dialog box when you’re about to do something irreversibly destructive that need to go.

   Mike

4. 4

   ryan on April 26th, 2005

   Your right on with that one mike. A confirmation would have solved the problem.

5. 5

   Jon on May 29th, 2005

   Context menus are fantastic, but linear context menus have serious interaction issues. I vastly prefer radial context menus. Try out the radial context menu for firefox.

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