How Apple’s contextual menus violate the Human Interface Guidelines
Apple’s contextual menus violate every one of the Contextual Menu guidelines established in the Apple Human Interface Guidelines. You don’t need to look far to find the violations, either: a glance at Safari and Mail is enough.
Safari
Safari displays PDFs in the browser window with a handy contextual menu to control how the PDFs are displayed. But most of the commands are only available in the contextual menu, violating the following guideline:
Always ensure that contextual menu items are also available as menu commands. A contextual menu is hidden by default and a user might not know it exists, so it should never be the only way to access a command. In particular, you should not use a contextual menu as the only way to access an advanced or power-user feature.
— Contextual Menus, Apple Human Interface Guidelines, Apple Inc.
No equivalent menu commands Safari’s PDF support may have started as a plugin and may still be implemented that way, which might explain why none of the PDF-specific menu items are available as menu commands. Nevertheless, many users have no idea this functionality exists because they’ve never thought to examine the contextual menu for PDF-specific actions.
Recommendation: add these items to a View > PDF submenu in the menubar. They’re too numerous and too infrequently used to place within a top-level menu, but a submenu would make a perfect fit.
Inconsistent names The top three commands also differ inconsistently from their menu counterparts. The Guidelines don’t say that contextual names must match those in the menus, but where they differ they should at least be consistent. Safari’s commands don’t agree on the use of the word “Page”:
| In Contextual Menu | In Menubar | ||
|---|---|---|---|
| Reload | Reload Page in View menu | ||
| Save Page As… | Save As… in File menu | ||
| Print Page… | Print… in File menu |
Although it seems inconsistent to remove the word “Page” from the first menu item while adding it to the next two, it does improve things aesthetically—and might even improve usability since Reload is uniquely short among the most frequently used items at the top of the menu, making the menu item groups more visually distinct.
But appending “Page” to the next two items causes an unfortunate ambiguity by confusing the web page shown in the browser window with the PDF page you’re currently viewing. Next Page and Previous Page at the bottom of the menu refer to pages within the PDF document, while Save Page As… and Print Page… at the top of the menu refer to the the web page within the browser. Because of this ambiguity, you cannot be quite sure whether those top items will save and print all of the pages within the PDF, or only the PDF page you’re currently viewing. That they’ll apply to the entire PDF document you can be reasonably sure, but not entirely so.
Recommendation: Name the commands Save PDF As… and Print PDF….
Includes infrequently used commands Safari’s contextual menus contain commands for saving and printing the page, in clear violation of the following Guideline:
Include a small subset of the most commonly used commands in the appropriate context. For example, Edit menu commands should appear in the contextual menu for highlighted text, but a Save or a Print command should not.
— Contextual Menus, Apple Human Interface Guidelines, Apple Inc.
Recommendation: Remove the commands for saving and printing the page. They’re useful, but they complicate the contextual menus.
When you’re composing a new message, Mail displays a contextual menu with 6 adjacent submenus, once of which also has a second-level submenu. This violates both clauses of the following Guideline.
Use submenus in contextual menus with caution and be sure to keep them to one level.
— Contextual Menus, Apple Human Interface Guidelines, Apple Inc.
Too many submenus Contextual submenus are a tempting solution for text-editing applications needing to support numerous editing options like font choice, speech, spelling, and so on. An e-mail application like Mail must also support additional options like clickable URLs and quote levels. Put all that together and adding submenus becomes hard to avoid.
Mail groups its many submenus together at the bottom of the menu to get them out the way of the more frequently accessed commands, but this makes it too easy to accidentally choose the wrong submenu.
Recommendation: Remove the Writing Direction submenu entirely and move the Quote Level commands up one level into the contextual menu, as shown at right. Writing direction is changed so infrequently it probably doesn’t need to be in a contextual menu at all, while moving the quoting commands into the contextual menu splits the remaining submenus into two groups, making them easier to distinguish.
Also, adding the 
Dictionary icon to the Look Up in Dictionary command would lend a welcome touch of color and help to further delineate the different command groups within the contextual menu.
Submenus are too deep The Spelling and Grammar submenu contains too few commands to justify a secondary submenu.
Recommendation: Collapse the Check Spelling submenu into a single Check Spelling While Typing command, just as many other applications do. The additional choices remain available in both Preferences and the Edit menu.
Contains keyboard shortcuts The keyboard shortcuts included with the commands in the Quote level submenu also violate another Guideline:.
If a command has a keyboard shortcut, don’t display the shortcut in the contextual menu. Because a user uses a contextual menu as a shortcut to a set of task-specific commands, it’s redundant to display the keyboard shortcuts for those commands.
— Contextual Menus, Apple Human Interface Guidelines, Apple Inc.
Recommendation: The Guidelines are right—the keyboard shortcuts should go.
Though these are admittedly minor problems, they do complicate the contextual menus and make them harder to use. They also highlight how hard it is to create a clean and consistent user interface. As hard as Apple engineers sweat the details, violations and inconsistencies like these creep in anyway.
That’s one of the reasons the Apple Human Interface Guidelines are so valuable: they provide a broad perspective easily lost during development when you’re mired in implementation. They may be only guidelines, but they’re well-reasoned guidelines. If, when you disagree, you remember to question yourself as much as you question them, don’t be surprised to find that the Guidelines were right all along.
I think you misinterpreted the guideline for contextual menus only listing commands in context. The example you show should have “print page”
The guideline says don’t say print page if you have text highlighted.
It doesn’t make any sense to have print page when you have text highlighted but it absolutely makes sense to have print page in the example you show.
Hi,
Did you file bugs/enhancement requests with Apple?
Jason.
Heatmiser, you’re right about the misinterpretation. Safari only places the save and print commands in the contextual menu when nothing’s selected in the window. I am not convinced, though, that the commands need be included then. Finder doesn’t include them, neither does Mail, TextEdit, Preview, iChat, Address Book. or iWork (Keynote, Numbers, Pages). In fact, I couldn’t find another app that does include them.
If there’s something special about Safari that makes saving and printing a Web page more important and frequently-accessed than those other apps, then adding those commands to the contextual menu makes sense. Do people save and print more from Safari than Mail? I’d think not.
Great suggestions!
Jason, yes I filed three UI enhancement requests for the ones I thought egregious enough to warrant it.
Someone’s been reading comp.sys.mac.* on Usenet…