Contemporary design

The design work going on at MIT over the pond right now is very cutting edge with regards to interactive design, one such feature is the Anemone interactive menu design. Instead of your customary drop down menus design that is the norm in various GUI's this is a growing 'plant like' effect java applet that the user clicks on and drags the file they want which in turn grows into a whole new menu showing you the files within, and so on and so on.

This new form of menu design is great to look at and interact with, but functional use of it may not be as simple as the usual drop down menus so I doubt whether software company's in the future will resort to anything as radical as the anemone. space on screen for software such as Flash is a luxury most designers cant afford. So having something like the anemone as a way to access the various tools and options may be the future regarding the effective use of workspace within software such as Flash or Photoshop

Saying that one website has embraced this new form of menu (though not as extreme), the thesaurus on-line. The menu sets for this website are web like in appearance which has words linked to the word you’re searching and they in turn when clicked on have there own links.

This does make for a more enjoyable user experience not only because it’s a bit different from the norm but it’s a more visual experience than the traditional linear drop down menu.