mitchell Reporter
	Description • 11 years ago

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.3; WOW64; rv:29.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/29.0 (Beta/Release)
Build ID: 20140210004002

Steps to reproduce:

Click burger button


Actual results:

A bunch of buttons which given no indication of what type of interface they lead to


Expected results:

There should be an indication when a button will lead to a submenu. A small arrow or something. Furthermore, there should also be an indication when a new window will be opened by a button press. This is UI design 101 guys.

Also the submenus are awful, cramped with only space for a dozen list items and no other columns. But that's 'by design', no doubt.

	:Gijs (he/him)
	Comment 1 • 11 years ago

(In reply to Mitchell Ferguson from comment #0)
> There should be an indication when a button will lead to a submenu. A small
> arrow or something. Furthermore, there should also be an indication when a
> new window will be opened by a button press. This is UI design 101 guys.

Your bugreport would have benefited from being less aggressive/condescending, but let's forget that for the moment.

The toolbar buttons do actually have tooltips which have ellipses (...) if more information is required from the user to complete the action - not if they open a new window. The UI convention on all platforms we support is exactly that - it is not just about opening new windows. Note that "New Window" and "New Private Window" in the menu bar also don't have ellipses, so we are being consistent, too.

I could see there being an advantage to showing which buttons open subviews, but I'm not sure how best to do that. Cluttering the menu needlessly is something we definitely want to avoid.

Note that we also don't indicate this for normal toolbarbuttons in the navbar, such as the downloads panel vs. the home button. I'm also not sure it is essential - for most items, it is either self-evident what will happen (e.g. "new window" opens a new window, 'full screen' will make the window go into fullscreen mode) or it is quickly understood once first used. In our user testing, the latter happened quite a bit.

I don't know that we really want to change anything here, but let's ask someone on the UX team.

> Also the submenus are awful, cramped with only space for a dozen list items
> and no other columns.

I'm not sure what your point is here. There are various bugs to do with the vertical size of the submenu, as well as with how much space items take up within those subviews. Some of them are fixed on Nightly already and will make their way to Aurora as soon as possible. However, you seem to mention 'columns', so maybe you mean horizontal space? It really isn't clear. It also seems completely orthogonal to this bugreport's summary (about indicating which items open subviews), so please search for existing bugs regarding this issue, file a separate one if you cannot find anything that matches what you're having problems with and include more details. Feel free to CC me and I'll try to help move the issue along if it's important.

	(Currently slow to respond) Philipp Sackl [:phlsa] (Firefox UX) please use needinfo
	Comment 3 • 11 years ago

I just left a comment about this in bug 941436