>>Sorry, but your answer is as unuseful as unpolite. How a UI works is decided by the customer whio pays.
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>Tore's choice of word was poor, but the idea was correct. A menu that has dozens of items on a single list is a poor choice. The "customer who pays" is paying for expertise and that should include telling him when what he asks for isn't a good idea. As the expert, our job is to guide the customer to an application that accomplishes his underlying goals. Having an application that's hard to use surely isn't one of them.

OTOH, one recurring theme that I keep seeing more and more is the growing complexity of apps. And that complexity has to be laid out in the GUI somewhere - either rich menus, or long toolbars or local toolbars on each of twenty pages of a pageframe... It has to be somewhere.

In my experience, whichever layout is chosen is good as long as it allows for moderate expansion, additions of perhaps 15-20% of more items. The one thing that is, IMO, absolute no-no is to rework it and shuffle options around. That's equivalent to shuffling stuff on the shelves in a supermarket, where it has the goal to make you walk around, hoping that you'll do something you usually don't (e.g. buy something you otherwise wouldn't). In an app that someone is using for years it's a major annoyance.

The case at hand is the ribbons in M$ Office... I use it only sometimes (mailmerges in the app - for myself I use Libre) and for some options I simply don't know where to look. If this was a supermarket, I'd walk out with an empty cart.