Menubar and Toolbar
User Interface (UI) concepts: The classic Menubar and Toolbar / Menu bar or part of W.I.M.P. design. WIMP computing denoting a style of interaction using elements of the user interface providing mouse-operated toolbars and menus to access its functions.
The menubar and toolbar provides unobtrusive dirct access to all the commands in an application while remaining out of the way of the core application work space. This allows for convenient execution for experts while providing guidance and education for novices. Exploring the menubar is how users learned about an application.
The Decline of Usability
The classic Menubar and Toolbar are being replaced by newer UI design elements such as:
- Ribbon
- Hamburger Menu
These modern replacements are not better, just different. The Ribbon menu was a studied attempt at being more efficient. The Google Hamburger Menu is a way to address different mentalities or the lazy lack of menu exploration enthusiasm in millennial and younger generations.
Quoted from an article by carl svensson, "Another apparently unfashionable UI standard is the menu bar. It used to be a lowest common denominator between platforms and, when still present, it works basically the same on Windows, Mac and Unix-likes. For the most part, it even keeps the traditional "File, Edit, View" approach to things. The Gnome designers, however, have decided that such menus are apparently a bad feature and they should probably never have been used in the first place. To rectify more than three decades of such folly, they have created... something I'm not sure what to call."
"One of the tricks up their sleeve is the hamburger menu. On smartphones, it's a great feature, but on the desktop, it's unnecessary: If there's anything we have on today's wide screen displays, it's horizontal space. In Gnome, it seems to be a catch-all for UI operations that didn't end up somewhere else."
