[Sigia-l] guidelines, resources, thoughts on tree and menu design

[Markus Mayer]

Hi,

In one of my projects (internal browser based applications) I 've come 
along the need to provide guidelines for designing pull-down menus 
(web-interface). I am aware of guidelines regarding the design of 
conventional menus (using the standard windows ones for example) what I do 
lack however are guidelines on how to actually implement the menu widget:
- latency of the menu
- point-and-click vs. just point
- how to handle cascades
- use visual cues to indicate menu entry currently selected
- etc....

A second question arose around the design of a web-based tree widget. 
Imagine a situation where you use a tree to visualise a relatively complex 
product configuration e.g. for an insurance quotation system. An insurance 
product is composed of many components, sub-products, options, etc. Our 
design team choose the approach to visualise such a product  in a tree 
with all the different characteristics of an insurance product distributed 
over the nodes and branches of such a tree. If you want to select a 
component or an option you simply click on the check-box displaying its 
name in the tree. The problem that arose with this approach is that 
sometimes it is necessary to add additional product components (not known 
at the beginning) to the tree (say I want to have two cars on one 
insurance policy). Sometimes it is also necessary to perform actions 
directly on objects within the tree (which is hard to do without 
right-click menus). For instance if I navigate to 
customer/category/sub-category/claims and would like to file a new claim. 

Has anybody  come across similar issues before?

Thanks a lot,

Markus

p.s.: is cross-posting allowed and if not what is the preferred way of 
distributing a question to two lists?