[splatch]

I have been using XMBC for 2 years now; I consider myself something an authority
on UI design. I find the media menus on the home page for each media type,
far more frustrating than helpful and they lead to much unintended mis-navigation,
rather then being good shortcuts..

I have experienced this exact problem in my own work; coming into a project with
a given application; the navigational menus where this kind of axis/hover menus
that intended to help users and be modern, but in fact, they were difficult to navigate,
and required more precision than was actually possible for most users.

Turned out, normal menus of some kind, or simply making users navigate the heirarchy
without shortcut menus was preferred, to making naviagional mistakes and having to start
over.

In fact, with a normal mouse, they menus are very difficult to use and I avoid them. I understand
these may have been intended for touch screens but the are also almost impossible to use
on high resolution small screen mobile devices as well.

I recommend a complete overhaul of this navigational system and I can't recommend more
than to simply stop using "side swipe" shortcut menus on the home page. They are
icky..

[TRaSH]

Use a skin that doesn't use horizontal menus but vertical ones.
Perhaps that might help for your problem.
Or do you mean something else ?

[Karnagious]

Hello Mods,

Can you please consider locking this thread before I reflexively derail it completely in reaction to the OP dubbing HIMSELF an authority on UI in his first interaction with a community that is replete with talented skinners while in apparent total ignorance of the skins they have created?

[jjd-uk]

I see 2 misconceptions.

First all as a full screen media centre application our primary use case is playback of media on a TV in your lounge, thus the UI is designed to be what is often referred to as a "10ft UI". The UI conventions we follow are what you would find on your PVR, Blu-Ray player, game console etc all of which are designed to be operated from the couch where the display device is a TV.

Secondly the input device the UI is design to work with is a remote, although a mouse can be used that is most optimal for desktop apps where you are sat no more than a couple of feet from the screen, as stated above this scenario is not our primary use case hence mouse usage is less than optimal.

However despite these 2 things we have a skin API, so if the default skin doesn't suit then there's a vast amount of community developed alternatives, and if none of those suit your usage then you can develop your own which you can then share with the community if you wish.

[a11599]

The mouse is fine. Use the wheel to scroll the horizontal menu. You can also hide items that you are not using (if any) to make navigation easier.