Pie menus, or radial menus, with submenus are a nightmare to navigate. They are like those web pages which have tiny menus that slide out, but only give you a tiny amount of room to maneuver and if you go outside their tiny boxes they reset. Designers really need to use software the way real people do it and stop trying to be all design and no function.

Loading screens and their equivalent are the bane of my life. A number of people at work will not wait for an application, eg Excel, to finish what it is doing. If they have to wait for more than 10 seconds, they will open up Task Manager, see that the status says “Not Responding” then kill that application. They don’t realise that it can just mean the application is busy.

The circular pie menus are hardly something new, though they may be new to Microsoft; I’ve seen them used in a number of games over the years, not the least of which being Linden Labs’ Second Life.

The problem with pie menus is that real-estate is limited, so using them in a case where a large number of options is available is rather tricky. Also, I’ve never seen an implementation that handled submenus well; pie menus just don’t cascade into submenus as naturally as a drop-down menu. Just try to imagine the typical context menu you get when right-clicking a file in Explorer; it’d get ugly pretty quickly.

About “Loading” screens, what users really want is to know that ’something is happening’ when they click on something; they know that the computer is /actually/ responding to their input. I frequently see users start up multiple instances of a single app because said app has no ‘loading’ or spash screen; they don’t see anything happening, so they try it again and again, then get frustrated when their computer slows down and multiple instances pop up.

makes you wonder how they spend all those billions of research dollars.

At least one Microsoft person at last aknoledges that the iPod/ iTunes experience is easier to use than anything offerd by competitors.