Navigation
There are some issues here. Navigating across one view and the other is always a matter of choice. You see, there are lot of ways of navigating across a software. Some of them are
1.Menus
2.Nested Menus and Context Menus
3.Tabs and Tabs Inside Tabs
4.Keyboard Shortcuts
5.Tool Bars
Right now I cant think of any other way one can navigate across applications. But I bet myself a hundred bucks, there are plenty of them. So you got to think, what will you use for navigation. You choose one of them. Why? what are the advantages? what looks better? which is easier etc etc. You’ve gotta think it all out. For example, you see if you are using a menu and only a menu to navigate across an application, you’ll need at least 2 mouse clicks to get to some other page, one click on the menu and the other on the menu item that names the page. Take a look at this scheme at flickr
Here I click on Contacts then I can see all these pages Latest Photos, Contact List, People Search, Invite Your Friends and Invite History. Then you choose one of them and you go to that page. There is also a Nested Menu where menus are built inside a menu item. I don’t really know what purpose they serve other than just giving access to a lot of functionality.
But menus can be irritating when you are moving from one page to the other very fast. For instance, when you are surfing the net. To solve this Mozilla introduced Tabs. It was great success. I am not sure if they were the first guys to realize the importance of a Tab but anyways, have a look.
Here you need only a single mouse click to navigate across the different views. That is very good when you are flipping through information at a very rapid speed. Surfing the net is a great application for that. If you notice, Mozilla has both menus and tabs. And different navigation items give access to different functionality! The Tab thing caught on so well that even Microsoft started using it in IE 7! Whats more people started using Tabs inside tabs. Check out this wordpress interface.
Here one has lot of child tabs to parent tabs. So to get to Manage->Categories, you’ll have to go to Manage first, the default Tab i.e. Posts will load first and then you get to Categories. The problem with this is that since every Parent tab WILL have a default page, the software loads two pages before you get to the page you really wanted. But let us say that 90 percent of the time, you need the Posts page in the Manage parent Tab. Then this this is OK. Not the most efficient, but OK. In such a case Menu always works better.
Of course there are also nested menus and Context menus. Here is a nested menu.
Apart giving user access to functionality they are not going to use so often, I don’t seen any other use of these. The point is you have a software with a lot of features, Microsoft Word for example. And you have to give the user some kind of access to that functionality right. And you cant cramp all of it in one menu. So you use a nested menu.
And finally the context menu. A context menu is nothing but the the menu that pops up when you right click on something. Depending on where your mouse was positioned during the right click, you give access to different functionality. This is a cool idea. In Windows if you right click on your desk top, you get this.
However, if you right click on a item ON the desk top, you get this
So depending on where the user has clicked, you can give him access to different functionalities. This is a very powerful way of deigning useful User interfaces.
I think.
