Somewhere along the line, and I’m not motivated enough to research it, menus apparently became bad.  I don’t mean they ever stopped working or became unsuitable for the tasks they are given, but just bad.  I’m talking about bad in the same sense as the BLINK tag, HTML frames, or command lines.

Whether it’s twitter clients:

programming utilities:

Even vertical market licensing exams:

Did I miss a memo or something?

It seems that nearly everyone trying to make new, pretty apps these days are going out of their way to drop one of the most useful and space-efficient interface components out the window so they can be replaced with gradient-rich buttons and tabs and/or shaded, cartoony icons.

Why?

I’ve become convinced that this is happening because we developers like “shiny” and “pretty”.  Oh sure, we’re happy to use gray and dull but we’re even more happy if we can show our bosses and clients that we can do “pretty” as well.  We may not have designer skills, but we can still make things look nice, right?

Unfortunately, this is becoming like the nerd who came to school telling his buddies that his big brother who gets all the girls wears Hai Karate and before you know it, everyone smells like a used car dealership.

So stop it.  There are indeed good use cases to use a button-centric interface.  And I’m certainly not suggesting that the old “menus-only” philosophy is better.  But we need to stop hopping on a certain look-and-feel bandwagon because Microsoft is (rightly) trying to bring designers directly into the process.

So who is driving this?  I can’t say.  I don’t know.  But it’s not the major application developers, at least not at this point.  Look at your browser.  It’s almost guaranteed that your browser has a menu at the top.

Look at Visual Studio.  Menus there, too.  Everywhere you look there are still menus and none of the major application houses are rushing to dump them.

There 2 compelling reasons to keep menus:

1. Users are already familiar with them and know how to use them.  Most applications have them at the top, drop down, etc.  Is it sexy?  Perhaps not, but it’s familiar.  Do you want people to use your applications or admire them.  Can it be both?  Certainly, but only if you don’t take away an expected UI element and with it a significant portion of usability.
2. Menus provide a “when all else fails” location for functionality and users know this.  When you can’t find something on a button, tab, slider, link, or icon you instinctively start looking in menus.  Everyone who’s worked with users has heard at least once (likely thousands) the complaint, “I couldn’t find it in a menu…”

Do we want to make our programs more or less functional?  Whether it’s the X to close, resizing from corners, or even menus at the top, it’s become part of the user experience and unless you want to retrain users, it is in all our best interests to continue with what works and build on it, not throw it away.

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