C H A P T E R 4

Menus

Menus present lists of items—commands, attributes, or states—from which the user can choose. Menus are based on the interface principle of see-and-point: People don’t have to remember command names because they can view all the available options at any time. Each application, including the Finder, has its own set of menus.

This chapter describes pull-down menus in the menu bar and contextual menus, which display when the user presses or clicks an object while pressing the Control key. For information about other kinds of menus, see “Pop-Up Menus” (page 124), “Combination Boxes” (page 128), “Command Pop-Down Menus” (page 127), and “Pop-Up Icon Buttons and Pop-Up Bevel Buttons” (page 134).

The Mac OS has only one menu bar at the top of the screen; this feature makes it much easier for users to access menu content. Don’t put menu bars in windows.

Menu Elements

Menu elements include the menu title, menu items, keyboard equivalents, submenu indicators, and separators.

C H A P T E R 4

Menus

Figure 4-1 A pull-down menu and its parts

Menu title

Menu item

Hierarchical menu (submenu) indicator

Keyboard equivalent

Note: For information about reserved and suggested keyboard equivalents for menu items, see “Reserved and Recommended Keyboard Equivalents”

(page 176).

Menu Titles

Menu titles should be one word that appropriately represents the items in the menu. For example, a Font menu could contain names of font families such as Helvetica and Geneva, but shouldn’t include editing commands such as Cut and Paste.

Menu Items

Menu item names should be one of the following:

■Actions (verbs or verb phrases) that declare the action that occurs when the user chooses the item. For example, Save means save my file and Copy means copy the selected data. Your action menu commands should fit into similar sentences.

■Attributes (adjectives or adjective phrases) that describe the change the command implements. Adjectives in menus imply an action and should fit into the sentence “Change the selected object to …” —Bold or Italic, for example.

46Menu Elements

Apple Computer, Inc. June 2002

C H A P T E R 4

Menus

When a menu item is unavailable—because it doesn’t apply to the selected object or to the selected object in its current state, or because nothing is selected, for example—the item should appear dimmed (gray) in the menu and is not highlighted when the user moves the pointer over it.

Capitalize the first letter of the first and last words, and the important words in phrases. For more information on proper capitalization of menu items, see “Capitalization of Interface Elements” (page 231).

Grouping Items in Menus

Logically grouping menu items is the most important aspect of arranging your menus. Grouping items in a menu makes it easier to quickly locate commands for related tasks.

In general, place the most frequently used items at the top of the menu, but create groups of related items rather than arranging them strictly by frequency of use. For example, although the Find Next or Find Again command may be used infrequently, it should appear right below the Find command. In a menu that contains both actions and attributes, don’t put actions and attributes in the same group.

Group interdependent attributes. They can be in a mutually exclusive attribute group (the user can select only one item, such as font size) or an accumulating attribute group (the user can select multiple items, such as Bold and Italic).

If a menu repeats a term more than twice, consider dedicating a menu or hierarchical menu to the term instead. For example, if you need commands like Show Info, Show Colors, Show Layers, Show Toolbox, and so on, you could create a Show menu or a submenu off of a Show item.

How many separators to use is partly an aesthetic decision and partly a usability decision. Figure 4-2 shows a menu that depicts the right balance of grouping, contrasted with two menus showing insufficient grouping and too much grouping. Use this picture as a visual guide when trying to decide how many separators to use in your menus.

Apple Computer, Inc. June 2002

C H A P T E R 4

Menus

Figure 4-2 Grouping items in menus

In Mac OS X, a menu separator is a blank space (instead of a line). The menu-drawing code in Carbon and Cocoa automatically inserts the right amount of space between menu items to form a separator.

Hierarchical Menus (Submenus)

You can use hierarchical menus to offer additional menu item choices without taking up more space in the menu bar. When the user points to a menu item with a submenu indicator, a submenu appears. Submenus have all the features of menus, including keyboard equivalents, status markers (such as checkmarks), and so on.

48Menu Elements

Apple Computer, Inc. June 2002