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- When designing the layout of the Menu, remember that the Menu is not just a tool to provide access to
functionality, but that it also tells the user what functionality is available.
- Menu cascades have two uses
- To hide advanced functionality in order to avoid frightening novice users
- To group together connected functionality
- Avoid having cascades as the first item in a menu pane. Otherwise, navigation gets complicated.
- The Menu is not available in dialogs. However, the Menu button might have other functionality in dialogs.
6.1 Guidelines for designing the Menu
Step 1: Menu structure
Use the parts of the standard menu structure that are adequate.
If the standard File-Edit-View-Tools division is not applicable, do not stick to it. For instance, a File menu has no
meaning in the calculator application. Thus, it could be named Printing etc. Also, an application could have more
than one category of object which it could create, edit, list, short or view. In such cases, Alarm-City-Country or
Card-Group-List, for example, or a similar structure should be used instead of File-Edit-View.
To make the selection quicker, the most frequently used commands could be located as the first (or last) itemsin a
menu pane.
Step 2: Group menu items
Use standard menu structures, including separators, when appropriate.
Group menu items so that ones with similar functionality, nature or having the same object are grouped close to
each other. After this, emphasise the grouping by using separators.
The 'Life cycle' method can be used when appropriate, e.g., by first creating an object, then adding something to
it, and finally giving it a finishing touch.
Avoid having many 1-item groups or groups of 5 or more items in one menu. 1-item and 5-item groups are a
good solution if their functionality is clearly different from other items in the Menu.
Step 3: Use separators
When there are only 1 or 2 menu items, do not use separators.
When there are 3 menu items, use no more than 1 separator or do not use separators at all.
Max. 3 separators per menu pane (it is recommended that a menu pane be restricted to a maximum of 6 items).
Separate mutually exclusive menu items into a single group. Also separate commands from settings, option
buttons from tick boxes, and so on.
Step 4: Use ellipses
When a menu item requires additional definitions or where it opens a separate dialog, the menu item in question is
marked with a character ellipses (…). Below is an example with the command 'New' :
New CTRL+N (without ellipses if the new document is created right away)
New... CTRL+N (with ellipses when additional information has to be inserted before the new document is created,
for example, template selection, size, color palette, etc.)
6.2 Standard menu items
The standard menu structure illustrated below can be applied to most of the applications. Using a standard menu
structure helps the user to learn the application menu faster and to increase the speed of his of her use of the Menu.
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