About Face 2.0(c) The Essentials of Interaction Design

Toolbars are one of the more recent GUI developments, relatively speaking. Although not an exclusive feature of Windows, they were first popularized there, unlike so many other GUI idioms popularized on the Mac. The toolbar has great strengths and weaknesses, but these are complementary to those of its partner, the menu. Whereas menus are complete toolsets with the main purpose of teaching, toolbars are for frequently used commands and offer little help to the new user.

Toolbars: Visible, Immediate Functionality

The typical toolbar is a collection of butcons, usually without text labels, in a horizontal slab positioned directly below the menu bar or in a vertical slab attached to the side of the main window. Essentially, a toolbar is a single row (or column) of immediate, graphical, always-visible menu items.

Great ideas in user interface design often seem to spring from many sources simultaneously. The toolbar is no exception. It appeared on many programs at about the same time, and nobody can say who invented it first. What is clear is that its advantages were immediately apparent to all. In a stroke, the invention of the toolbar solved the problems of the pull-down menu. Toolbar functions are always plainly visible, and the user can trigger them with a single mouse click.

Toolbars are not menus

Toolbars are often thought of as just a speedy version of the menu. The similarities are hard to avoid: They offer access to the program's functions, and they usually form a horizontal row across the top of the screen. Designers imagine that toolbars, beyond being a command vector in parallel to menus, are an identical command vector to menus. They think that the functions available on toolbars are supposed to be the same as those available on menus.

But the purpose of toolbars is actually quite different from the purpose of menus, and their composition shouldn't necessarily be the same. The purpose of toolbars and their controls is to provide fast access to functions used frequently by those who have already mastered the program's basics. Toolbars offer nothing to beginners and are not designed with that purpose in mind. The menu is where the beginner must turn for help.

The great strength of menus is their completeness and verbosity. Everything the user needs can be found somewhere on the program's menus. Of course, this very richness means that they get big and cumbersome. To keep these big menus from consuming too many pixels, they have to be folded away most of the time and only popped-up on request. The act of popping up excludes menus from the ranks of visible and immediate commands. The tradeoff with menus is thoroughness and power in exchange for a small but uniform dose of clunkiness applied at every step. The butcons on toolbars, on the other hand, are incomplete and inscrutable; but they are undeniably visible, immediate, and very space-efficient compared to menus.

Toolbars freed menus to teach

As we discussed in the previous chapters, it was the toolbar's invention that finally permitted menus to focus on their pedagogical purpose. After frequently used functions were put into toolbar butcons, drop-down menus ceased to be the primary function-launching idiom. For users with even slight experience, it was much faster and easier to click on a butcon than to drop down a menu and select an item—a task requiring significantly more dexterity and time. After toolbars became widespread, the menu fell into the background as a supporting character. The only programs where menus are still employed for daily-use functions are programs with poorly designed or non-existent toolbars.