Our recent post about contextual pie menus as an alternative to simple lists drew some strong responses from readers -- both here and at the source. Now Mozilla designer Jono DiCarlo is back with another, slightly tweaked version that builds on the original, but incorporates some changes based on user feedback.
This time the menu isn't strictly a pie, it's a pie of squares, which solves a couple of common user complaints -- text layout is easier to read and sub-menu items become much easier to navigate.
DiCarlo has a new mockup available for testing, which you can find on his demo page (note that you'll need Firefox 3, or another browser that supports the HTML5 canvas element, for the demo to work correctly).
Perhaps the biggest advantage of the square version of the pie menu is that mousing over a square can invoke a sub-menu that cascades down (or out, depending on the parent square's location in the pie). However, at least on some level, the sub-menu is essentially a list, which puts things back where they started -- navigating a list of items.
After playing around with this latest incarnation, I do think it's better, but I'm still not sure the concept is a huge improvement over the traditional list. There are some places where the improvement is obvious. For instance, with a menu to navigate backwards or forwards through your browser history, it makes sense to have back on the left and forward on the right rather than both in a list. But there are plenty of cases where the "improvement" offered by the pie menu is more subjective.
As Webmonkey reader joeBoy pointed out the comments of the previous post, hardware has evolved to deal with the list menu -- the scroll wheel eliminates much of the hassle involved in getting to the bottom of a list -- and those tools are lost with a pie menu.
At the same time, the pie menu might gain some appeal with what's becoming an increasingly common hardware feature -- gesture-support (think the iPhone or new MacBooks). Using gestures makes the pie menu feel a bit more natural and offers alternative ways of selecting items. For example, imagine if, once invoked, a simple twist of the fingers rotated the menu giving quick and easy access to each item.
Still, call me old-fashioned if you like, but I think I'll stick with a simple list for now.
Be sure to let us know what you think of DiCarlo's new demo and what, if anything, still bothers you about the pie menu.
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