A co-worker (thanks Tony) passed this on recent days: Ten Most
Persistent Design Bugs from AskTog. They all hit home, but #3
hits the hardest.
'Mysteriously dimmed menu items' - we gray out menu items when they're not
available but don't do anything to tell the user why they were greyed out.
So the user is expected to use their innate genius and grok why the item is
greyed out. As a developer this has always bothered me.
Unfortunately in the past when I've suggested solving this problem the reaction
is always - but this doesn't fit with industry standards. In addition
Tog's solution (allow the user to click greyed out item for more info) requires
custom code for the menus.
What we really need is for industry behemoth (is MS listening) to help solve
this problem. We need both a standard UI guideline and BCL classes that
implement it. If just one or two tiny companies try to solve this problem
- users will not notice (after we all know that grey menu items can't be
clicked) and not understand what we're trying to do. If MS does it the
rest of us will fall into line over a few years.