Pop-Up Menus

Figure 4-41 A pop-up menu and its parts

Pop-up menus act like other menus: the user can drag through them and choose an item, which then flashes briefly and appears as the current choice in the menu. The user can also move outside the menu to leave the current value active. (If a pop-up menu reaches the top or bottom of the screen, it scrolls like other menus.)

Pop-up menus work well for presenting a number of mutually exclusive choices. However, they hide these choices from view. You should use a pop-up menu when the user doesn't need to see all the choices all the time
in a dialog box or window. You can use a pop-up menu when you have from 5 to 12 items. If your item list fits in this range, it's a good idea to use a pop-up menu because the user will be able to see all the choices when the menu is open and won't have to scroll through the menu to see additional choices. If you have more than 12 items, use a scrolling list instead. Users would have a hard time scrolling a pop-up menu to see all the choices and then reversing the scrolling direction to choose the item they wanted.

Figure 4-42 shows a pop-up menu in a dialog box and the same menu when it's open.

Figure 4-42 Opening a pop-up menu

If you need to show only a few choices, consider using another interface element instead of a pop-up menu. Figure 4-43 shows such a situation. Since there are only three types of columns to choose from, and the user can make an exclusive choice, it makes more sense to use radio buttons for the choices. The radio buttons don't take up much more space than the pop-up menu would and they're always visible when the dialog box is open.

Figure 4-43 Pop-up menus versus radio buttons

Pop-up menus provide a list from which only a single selection can be made. These choices could be expressed as nouns (things) or adjectives (states or attributes). Don't use pop-up menus when more than a single selection is needed. Allowing multiple selections from a pop-up menu gives the user ambiguous feedback. The user knows only the current selection, not all of the settings currently in effect. This forces the user to open the menu to know what all the settings are.

Don't use pop-up menus for accumulating attribute lists like text style choices. Style menus provide multiple choice lists, which should be presented either as checkboxes in a dialog box or pull-down menus. If you put a multiple choice menu in a dialog box, you would destroy the ability of
the menu to provide feedback in the menu text. You would be hiding
essential information from the user, who would only be able to see it
when the menu was open. You can use checkboxes to provide a set of "many-from-many" choices.

Figure 4-44 shows an example of a pop-up menu with more than one choice in effect. The figure also shows one correct way to provide the same choices by using checkboxes. You could also provide this same set of choices with a pull-down menu.

Figure 4-44 Pop-up menus versus checkboxes

Never create a hierarchical pop-up menu. Doing so would hide choices too deeply in the interface. It would also create an element that would be far too physically difficult to use.

Pop-up menus are not a means of providing more commands. Therefore they shouldn't contain actions (verbs). If there were a pop-up menu that contained commands, there wouldn't be a logical choice to display as the current choice. Figure 4-45 shows this dilemma. Commands aren't persistent choices, they are always available and aren't current as soon as they finish operating. In other words, don't use a pop-up menu to present choices that should appear in pull-down menus. Since the choices in a pop-up menu aren't visible at all times, the menu items shouldn't contain keyboard equivalents.

Figure 4-45 Don't use pop-up menus for commands