WinBox left vertical menu Sort order?

RouterOS General
1

So, why are the items in WinBox's left vertical menu in the order that they are?

I understand why it might make sense to put QuickSet paricularly prominently (although, as I never use QuickSet, I'd actually like to be able to hide it out of my way). And perhaps Make Supout.rif does belong at the bottom as it's so rarely used.

And I guess that the next items, WiFi, User Manager, Interfaces, WireGuard, Bright, PPP, Switch, and Mesh are "more commonly used" (except, again, not by me, and more importantly, I'd expect that there are such a wide range of who-uses-what-how with MikroTik gear that there is no "most commonly" used set of menu items.

I particularly find WiFi and WireGuard not being one right after the other as they would be alphabetically to make it just that little bit harder to go find which of the two that I might need at any given moment.

Then we have some things in alphabetic order, IP, IPv6, MPLS, Routing, System, Queues ... followed immediately by the definitely not in order Dot1X which seems more related to either the user stuff higher up in the list or RADIUS farther down the list!

Finally, we have several more system management related things like Files, Log, New Terminal (why New? why not just Terminal? most menu items re-open a thing if the thing is already open; New Terminal always only opens a New terminal, rather than getting you to already opened Terminal window(s)), .. then there are RADIUS (should be above with user, etc), Tools, followed out of order by Partition...

Is there conscious justification for these groupings and orders? Or just evolution and lack of focus on the usability aspect?

I'm never a fan of just changing things, particularly not of moving things that We All Know Where They Are, like Microsoft did a couple of years back exchanging the position in the Outlook Calendar new Meeting dialog of the Title (Subject): and Attendees (Required, Optional): fields; to this day I sometimes start typing the to whom in the Title field, because for many years that was the first field, and the learned brain-to-fingers action was Create New Meeting Request, Type To Whom To Send It ... Similarly, you drive a particular car for a long time, your fingers know where the radio controls are, then you get a new car, and it takes time to re-teach your body's automation where to aim to change the radio volume (or, even better, instead of changing the radio you turn on the seat heater in the middle of summer...)

That said, I do notice the extra cognitive load of WinBox's current doesn't-make-sense-to-me left vertical menu layout enough to cause me to ask this question, and to make the feature suggestion for WinBox:

Allow users to set the order of WinBox's left vertical menu items, and save/export that layout for use in other WinBox installations. And even allow grouping - somewhat like Microsoft Office's "ribbon" menu+submenus groups and/or tabs, with submenu items optionally insettable and collapsible.

Thoughts? Thanks.

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All are good thoughts. I remember having the same urge on how nice it would be hide unused items on the left menu (when started using winbox for the first time). It stopped being a problem very quickly, and now I see the advantage of current menu in that each item is in the exact same place every time. Motor memory offloads the cognitive work, so the end result is the same - efficiency through consistency. Now, Winbox 4 brought major changes to UI, and is by itself is disruptive enough. Left menu was one thing that Mikrotik didn't change, and that is good. It's wise to think before picking the battles we want to fight, otherwise we will always be fighting the fires (user's complaints about UI changes). Kaizen is the word that comes to mind here - continuous improvement, through a series of small, non-disruptive changes. That is the way to go.

3

As I said, "Allow users to set the order of WinBox's left vertical menu items, and save/export that layout for use in other WinBox installations. And even allow grouping - somewhat like Microsoft Office's "ribbon" menu+submenus groups and/or tabs, with submenu items optionally insettable and collapsible."

I don't propose that the default be changed. I propose that users be given the ability to set up what works for each one.