# Goal-oriented areas

Required by patterns Single setting, Garden of windows
May require patterns Menubar, Palette, Modeless feedback area

 ...whether you are working with a Single Setting or a Garden of Windows several functions may be needed by a user to achieve his goal.

==> Related functions, composing a task, need to be organized in a coherent manner. <==

Placing related functions into a window keeps them together, but they must be grouped so the user sees a logic in the layout.

A poorly organized layout is intimidating and difficult to use. An interfaces that requires the user to jump around the screen, selecting functions from nested windows is inefficient and annoying, because it interrupts the natural flow of work.

The purpose of a kitchen is to prepare a meal. This involves getting food from the refrigerator and pantry, retrieving pots and pans from the cabinets, cooking the meal on the stove, and washing up afterwards. These are the related subtasks that are performed to achieve the goal of preparing a meal. The one-tool-one-window approach to interface design is shortsighted. It would be like designing a house with a refrigerator in one room, the stove in another, the dishwasher and sink in yet another room.

Therefore:

==> Group related functions, that work toward completing a single goal, into areas on the same window. These functions should be organized into separate regions of that window based on closeness of relation. New windows should be reserved for additional tasks that are not related. <==

A drawing package, such as Visio, provides functions for creating rectangles, creating circles, changing colors, erasing, and filling polygons that are easily accessible and not buried within several layers of sub-windows. The functions are not placed arbitrarily around the drawing canvas, but are grouped logically so that functions are located next to related functions.

For example, stencils representing the basic shapes are located on a selection palette to the left of the drawing area. Functions for selecting the type of font, font color, and font size are grouped together on the left side of a tool bar above the drawing area. Functions for selecting line style, line color, arrowheads, and corner rounding are grouped together in the middle of the tool bar. A status bar below the drawing area provides a place to display status messages.

Consider frequency of use as another way of grouping items. From the vast number of colors available to a painter, she places the few that she needs for this particular painting on her paint pallette. Likewise, frequently used tools can be grouped in floating palettes that are not physically constrained by the drawing window, but are logically part of the drawing window.

An email program, such as Eudora, groups all of its commands in a menu bar. But frequently used functions like reply, reply all, forward, delete and print are also placed on a tool bar.

Commands can be grouped in a Menubar, or to reduce window clutter, you can use a Palette. When grouping related data together, use a Modeless feedback area...