Chapter 9. Tables and menus
This chapter covers
Just about every time we want to go out to eat, we find ourselves sitting in the car, wracking our brains as we try to think of somewhere to go. We end up naming different styles of food—“Japanese?” “Not bad, but not really what I’m in the mood for.” “Italian?” “Not tonight.” “Indian?” “That’s a good idea, but let’s keep thinking.” Especially when we’re hungry, we have a hard time thinking about what restaurants are nearby and coming up with good options.
Eventually, we came up with a plan: One afternoon, when we weren’t hungry and had time to think, we wrote up a list of restaurants in the area, organized by price and type of food. Now, when we decide to go out, we can look at the list and have concrete options to discuss. It doesn’t help when we’re in the mood for different things, but it makes the process of deciding where to go easier.
In a software application, a menu provides a function similar to our list of restaurants. A finite list of options is presented to users to guide them in deciding what tasks they wish to perform. Just as we sometimes rediscover a favorite place to eat that we haven’t visited in a while, users can discover functionality they didn’t know existed in your application by seeing it listed in a pull-down or context menu.