We have discovered this over the last few months. There are so many ways to create and organize menus, and so much variance in how menus function and look. Plus, with Teknision having tons of experience creating slick interfaces, and us having built and refined menu managers over the years, I was thinking this would be a breeze.
Roadblock 1 – Schrödinger’s menu item
The file and folder functionality methodology is something that almost every computer user is familiar with, so I was thinking we could piggyback off of that. But how would an uninformed user know what to do with a hybrid of both? This is the first key difference – on the web, an item in the menu can be both the file and the folder.
Roadblock 2 – What comes first, the page or the item?
Do you create the page first, then link it, or create the link, and build the page from there? Again, on a traditional OS menu, the likely process would be jumping to the place in your menu, then link it to an existing file.
Again, on a content management system, this process differs. Pages will likely be created first, and displayed nicely in the page manager. So we either have to A) expect that a user will automatically know that they have to go into a menu manager in order to see there links, or B) integrate some sort of menu management with the page manager.
Add this to the fact that there is a lot of functionality associated with menus – and that we already have enough new stuff for a user to learn – and we have ourselves in need of a killer solution.
I think the latest design solves quiet a few of our issues. It replicates how iTunes does its nested playlists, and kind of uses that to do initial placement of items from the page manager. While the menu manager itself isn’t listed here, it will appear when a menu is selected, giving you access to all of these extra controls.
I only have a couple of screenshots right now, but let me know what you think of the iTunes style menu concept. We have sooo many concepts for the menu manager itself, I wont even go there until we have examined them all properly. I would to hear suggestions about how you’ve dealt with menu management for the web in the past.
Tags: cms, demonstration, thoughts