Organizing hidden commands in a customizable tool bar

Question

We got a classic Windows tool bar with command buttons with icons. If you right click the toolbar you can choose Customize toolbar to open a dialog from where you can pick out the buttons to be shown from a range of let's say 30 buttons. This is because different users will have very different needs of buttons. There are no standard buttons that will be useful for all users.

The same right click menu also directly offers the options that are currently not shown as buttons.

^{download bmml source – Wireframes created with Balsamiq Mockups}

Here, the user has added three more options, Delete, Pie and Cell phone. They are now shown as buttons in the toolbar, and removed from the additional options in the right click menu.

^{download bmml source}

The problem is that it is hard to find the command you are looking for, as the commands sometimes appear as buttons, and sometimes as right click menu options.

How could we improve this? Some approaches we thought of are:

1. As above: Only show the commands that are not already appearing as buttons in the toolbar, too keep the right click menu as short as possible.

2. Always show all commands in the right click menu, no matter if they appear as buttons too. Please note that the mockups above only displays a few options, but the actual list is much longer.

3. Not showing any commands at all in the right click menu: they will have to be added as buttons first via the Customize Toolbar dialog.

4. Other.

Answer 1

Why not go with a Dropdown at the end of the list that says «more actions»?

I think this solves your issue of users looking for actions they cannot find, and lets the user customize the toolbar if he wants to.

If this is not an option, I would go for the right click showing all options of the buttons for accessibility reasons. If the user did right-click the menu, he is looking at the dropdown list of the rightclick and not at the menu anymore, so listing all option alphabetically helps finding the right command.

Answer 2

There is a traditional way of approaching this problem which can be exemplified by visual studio's implementation

They group the menu bar into functional sections, and each section has a little arrow drop at the end of it that shows all of the tool and an customization link. It feels a little complicated using it but it does accomplish the goals rather successfully.

I feel as though there may be a more elegant way to solve this problem but this was the best solution I could think of off the top of my head. I will be keeping an eye on this post to see what other users come up with :)

Answer 3

A sophisticated solution is the toolbar configuration of Mac OSX toolbars. You can drag the required commands to the toolbar and move their positions in the toolbar.

^{download bmml source – Wireframes created with Balsamiq Mockups}