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August 27, 2005
Making Microsoft Office work
You don't have to look any further than Microsoft's brilliant idea of "adaptive menus" to understand that usability labs mostly don't work.
Bill Gates' user "experts" have spent millions of dollars and untold amounts of time examining the way people use their products, and what they came up with was this idea of moving users' most frequently used command to the top of the list, and hide the rest.
Great idea. According to some researchers, until users get familiar with the idea, it takes longer to get something done with a restricted selection of tools. And even though people do adapt, the majority of people don't like adaptive menus. You can put Bleeding Edge firmly in that category. Faced with continually having to expand the menus to find the tool we wanted, we very quickly decided to turn that "feature" off.
Here's how: Go to the Tools menu, click Customize, then select the Options tab and check the "Always show full menus" box. Click OK.
Posted by cw at August 27, 2005 10:39 AM
Comments
Since this is user oriented feature, it all depends on context. In the case of a PC training environment, menus need to be fixed. In the case of Windows itself, there are good points to Adaptive Menus - my Start Menu panels have been known to go to three full length side panels and that is not counting the subpanels. In the case of Microsoft Word for the casual user doing repetitive admin type work, yes possibly a good idea. In the case of Microsoft Access and Microsoft Excel, an emphatic No.
For the Firefox right click menu with lots of extensions, aah http://img221.imageshack.us/img221/3241/tall4dn.jpg
Posted by: Ananda Sim at August 27, 2005 01:19 PM
Here here....
every pc i am on i turn that off and the owner always thanks me after (if they notice...lol)
Posted by: shabby at August 27, 2005 02:39 PM
Personally I hate the Adaptive Menus like "we" do! But, I think it better to put a feature in even if some people won't like and then give an option to turn it off.
JMTC
Molly
Posted by: Phillip Molly Malone at August 28, 2005 12:49 AM