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post_00799

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Post #799: It’s an interesting question. A few guidelines could be :

📋 Metadata

  • Author: Pior
  • Date: 2017-08-24 02:34:42
  • Type: discussion
  • Quality Score: 8/10

🏷️ Tags

ui-design intermediate

  • Pie Menu Editor
  • Popup Dialog Editor
  • Macro Editor
  • Menu Editor

💬 Content

It’s an interesting question. A few guidelines could be :

  • Avoiding the use of new terms. For instance, while “Sub-item” might make sense (and it does somehow), the problem is that this term is not used anywhere else in the addon. Therefore it would make the user wonder “wait, what is a Sub-Item by the way?”. Many users would probably understand, but regardless : introducing new terms should be avoided.

  • Don’t be afraid to use long text ! You have a whole line at your disposal to describe these 5 options. Therefore you can use as much text as you want (or even a sentence) to describe a non-intuitive option. You could put something like “Any user-created Menu, Pie or Macro”.

Also, an incomplete description, while not perfect, is always better than no description at all. It might not be perfect, but it doesn’t matter if that helps the user understand. And that’s why text (even when incomplete) is almost always better than cryptic/non-standard icons.

  • Or, you could introduce a new term (like “Item”) BUT you would then need to make it appear in the main interface earlier in the UX flow. Like this :

reCUA34.jpg1518×911 165 KB

Basically you can think of good, easily discoverable UX as a thread or a string that the user can naturally follow, forward and backwards. Meaning that there should be very obvious links between elements, so that the user needs to put as little effort as possible to connect the dots.

I hope this makes sense !

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