[Sigia-l] Grayed Out Nav Elements vs. Changing Nav Menu

[David Heller]

Hello,

I want to totally agree w/ Dan on this one. It is very important to keep the
layout of menus and buttons in place. This helps users learn the system
better as it begs questions of the system which allows them to learn about
the system.

Disappearing the way that MS does it is different than disappearing on
disablement.

Because we have so many menu items in our application we do limit the
viewing of some menu items based on context of the system. Again, I think MS
is a good model for how they do this with toolbars (we do it there as well).
In Outlook, I don't see calendar buttons in the toolbar when I'm in e-mail.
I save space, and I enhance the modal experience with this change. We do the
same w/ our menu items as well.

We also limit view of items (toolbar and menu) based on role. Only those
items a person with that role can do are shown (regardless of object type
selection or other enablement features).

The rule I try to tell my engineers: 
"If this user with this role in this context can NEVER do an action, then it
should be made invisible. If there is a possibility for them to do it, it is
visible and made enabled or disabled as is appropriate."

Of course, b/c there is disagreement about where context begins and ends
this is still problematic, but it definitely gets us to the right place,
that is for sure.

On the flip side, how to do disablement is important. We have a few skins
and there are complaints on a few that they can't tell which is disabled or
enabled in either buttons or menus. 

-- dave

David Heller
Sr. User Interface Designer
Documentum: The Leader in Enterprise Content Management
925.600.5636
 
david.heller at documentum.com
http://www.documentum.com/
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--"If it isn't useful, it will never be usable."