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Subject:Too many buttons! From:Alessandro Bottoni <bottoni -at- CADLAB -dot- IT> Date:Thu, 29 Oct 1998 15:06:06 +0100
geoff-h -at- mtl -dot- feric -dot- ca wrote:
"I must admit, you've piqued my curiosity. What do you need 100
buttons for? I'm sure there's a simpler way to do this, and it'd
prove to be an interesting problem for techwr-l to chew over."
[Alessandro Bottoni]
It is almost impossible to find your way among 100 buttons, even after a
long time of use.
You ought classify your buttons in homogeneous categories and show them a
category at a time, using cascading (nested) toolbars or something like
that. There are Java applets that implements cascading toolbars for HTML
pages (See www.developer.com for these applets or www.insideDHTML.com for a
JavaScript-oriented inspiration).
We have the same problem with 3D CAD software (hundreds of commands and a
single, crowded, user interface). Sometime, even a large set of cascading
toolbars fail to deal with this mess and we have to turn to a higher
organizational concept: "rooms". Rooms are specialized user interface that
deal with specific tasks. A toolbar or another system allow the user to
switch from a room to another (from the "shaping room" to the "finishing
room", for example).
For further info regarding UI design (and a little fun...), take a look at:
