Comments on: Joel gives bad advice: details at 11:00

By: Joe

Joe — Wed, 02 Jul 2008 05:22:39 +0000

I didn’t mean to imply that the message Joel talks about is a popup. But what else would the menu item do if you click on it and the associated action can’t be performed? Accept your click but do nothing? That’s even worse! With a Firefox-style notification bar, you risk the user not noticing it just opened (I often click on links and find that apparently nothing happened, and it takes me several clicks before I notice that it’s opened the “blocked popup” notification.)

I was picturing a still-active menu item with a short tag next to it (”DISABLED: No selection” or something), which pops open a more complete explanation if you ignore the tag and try to select it.

By: Peter McCurdy

Peter McCurdy — Wed, 02 Jul 2008 05:14:21 +0000

I don’t think he’s ever had comments on his blog as such; there’s a Fog Creek discussion board around somewhere though, which probably has threads about his articles.

As for my take, I think it’s an indictment of most of the last 25 years of UI design that when we hear “the menu item can display a message”, we think of modal dialog boxes. If Joel’s plan used a Firefox-style notification bar, then it wouldn’t be so massively irritating. That said, I don’t know whether it’d actually be annoying or not, and I’m not really the best person to judge either – for starters, I hardly ever use menu bars, and when I do, nothing much seems to be disabled anyway.

By: Stirling Westrup

Stirling Westrup — Wed, 02 Jul 2008 03:23:15 +0000

I have long advocated this. In the one WIMP interface I ever built from scratch (for a video game), disabled menu items were greyed out and clicking on them did nothing, but hovering the mouse over one would tell you why it was greyed out.