[nirimda]

I used to use a lot of Gtk+ apps, where the menu item was disabled, but all this meant was that it was shown greyed out. In fact, as far as the toolkit was concerned it was still active and still sent a message to the app, and the app was supposed to respond to the message and inform the user about why the action was presently unavailable. I think that was a good choice at the time, because a menu was a stateful bit of UI (clicking the menu item closes the menu), so a fore-warning that the activity is unavailable might help me remember "oh, I forgot to ..." before I see the message, but I can still try anyway and find out what I didn't know.

Nowadays, I think menu options in user interfaces are much rarer, and complex stateful applications are usually HTML web programs where the disabled flag is a hint to the web browser to reject the interaction. Some of these web programs color submit buttons in a washed-out version of the normal color until the form is fully validated, but they will report the reason (to a greater or lesser utility) when clicked - such a widget is not formally disabled to the computer engineer, it's just presented to look like one. I find this subtle distinction frustrating, because it represents an ambiguity of thought that makes precise conversation difficult. Why should a widget ever reject interaction? A widgetset/toolkit is just a medium for dialog between a user and the developer, and they should always be allowed to communicate. A software developer should be able to say "hi widget set, please let the user know this button doesn't make sense at the moment" but they should not be allowed to say "hi widget set, if the user wants to tell me something - i don't want to know it, just throw it away. we're not on speaking terms" (They could, of course, completely ignore the user, but it's intuitively obvious that they shouldn't completely ignore the user. Most developers intuitively want to communicate the reason for the error if they know it's possible for a button to be clicked when they can't handle it, but they often get frustrated because the UI designer didn't clearly indicate to them how they should communicate errors - but perhaps they them what they shouldn't do and now they are stuck).

I liked the option 5 mockup in the link, although I'm not so sure it works for actions (like shooting) so much as state toggles (like activating the weapon). I do strongly disagree with the reasoning at the end of the page "it's okay to break the rules for a piece of software that people often use", because it's 100% a case of "rules for thee but not for me". Aside from the fact that I might have been using Outlook until I changed jobs to a new one (and there's a lot of people who only use Gmail unwillingly/primitively and attempt to use the phone and Teams and Slack and meatspace for their communication needs), it's exactly the most commonly used programs that set the norms for users and software developers. We know how to communicate because we imitate previous dialogues. If the most commonly used programs get to break the rules because some of the people who use them use them dozens of times a day whereas others only want to use the features once a week or two and only manage to use them once a month or so, then the members of both parties will come to the view that cryptic software is fine - one because they use it all the time and have no problem, and the other because they see that hard-to-understand software is highly regarded. And so the designer of a widget designing tool will say "no, it's fine for the widget to show only when it's available, because the people who use this widget-designing software will almost always be using it daily, and they'll only have to learn it once at the beginning of their career". Are they correct? Who knows. At this point it's just a position in the design space by the user interface designer.