Expandable indexes vs. sequential menus for searching hierarchies on the World Wide Web

An experiment is reported that compared expandable indexes providing full menu context with sequential menus providing only partial context. Menu depth was varied using hierarchies of two, three and four levels deep in an asymmetric structure of 457 root level items. Menus were presented on the World Wide Web within a browser. Participants searched for specific targets. Results suggest that reducing the depth of hierarchies improves performance in terms of speed and search efficiency. Surprisingly, expandable indexes resulted in poorer performance with deeper hierarchies than did sequential menus.     

一种嵌入式系统液晶显示菜单结构的实现方法

液晶显示模块作为显示终端和人机接口普遍运用于嵌入式系统中,针对嵌入式系统对人机对话接口简单、便捷的要求,提出了1种在C语言环境下,液晶显示（LCD）多级菜单结构的实现方法。此方法运用一维线性数组的数据结构,使设计出的菜单结构清晰易懂,对存储资源的利用效率高,且扩展性好。并用C51语言验证了这种方法的可行性。此方法适合在嵌入式应用系统开发中使用。     

The menu metaphor: food for thought

Menu selection in human/computer interaction is a metaphor of the restaurant menu. Although menu selection is widely used, its scope is currently limited, ill-defined, and information lean. A comparison of the restaurant menu and the computer menu reveal three avenues of improvement in menu systems. The correspondence of elements and features between restaurant and computer menus suggests that this powerful metaphor should be more fully developed. Second, there are a number of advantages of dynamic computer menus over static listings common to restaurants. Finally, restaurant menus currently have the advantage of breadth, richness, and graphic layout as well as a natural support system (the server) that is unparalleled in current computer applications. An analysis of deficiences in computer menus should prove invaluable in developing the next generation of menu selection techniques.     

Comparison of 3D and 2D menus for cell phones

Few prior studies have directly compared 3D and 2D menus for cell phones. Because the technology available for cell phone interfaces has changed in recent years, interface guidelines for cell phones need to be re-evaluated, especially with regard to the use of 3D interfaces. In the present study, we first compared performance of tasks for menus with different breadths using three 3D menus (revolving stage, 3D carousel, and collapsible cylindrical tree) shown on the small display screen of an iPhone® simulator. Performance was best with the revolving stage menu, and there was a nonsignificant tendency for it to be rated as preferred by the participants. Then, we compared the 3D revolving stage menu to a 2D overview menu, for tasks of different complexity and menus of different breadths, on an actual iPhone. The 3D menu was preferred by users at high breadth levels, and the 2D menu showed better performance than the 3D menu with low memory load. From the results, recommendations for the design of menus for small displays were developed.     

Complementary menus: Combining adaptable and adaptive approaches for menu interface

This study proposes a method of coupling adaptable and adaptive approaches to the design of menus. The proposed complementary menu types incorporate both adaptability and adaptivity by dividing and allocating menu adaptation roles to the user and the system. Four different types of interface adaptation (i.e., adaptable with/without system support and adaptive with/without user control) were defined. They were implemented in a hypothetical prototype mobile phone via a hotlist (an additional collection of quickly accessible items). A controlled lab experiment was conducted to compare the menu types and investigate the effects of the system support in the adaptable menus and the user control in the adaptive menus. Twenty subjects participated in the experiment and performed menu selection tasks. Both performance and user satisfaction measures were collected. The results showed that adaptable and adaptive menus were superior to the traditional one in terms of both performance and user satisfaction. Providing system support to the adaptable menu not only increased the users’ perception of the efficiency of selection, but also reduced the menu adaptation time. Important implications for the design of menus are described and valuable insights into the menu interface adaptation were gained from the quantitative and qualitative analyses of the experimental results.

Relevance to industry

The evaluation experiment conducted in this study may provide valuable information to designers of adaptive or adaptable menus. Adding system support to adaptable menu would be an attractive option to consider. Also, the results of a user survey provide useful information to the practitioners in mobile phone industry on the features users accessed most frequently.     

建立和使用灵活的动态菜单

菜单定义保存在文件中,系统运行时根据捆绑的菜单定义文件动态生成菜单,这样不需要更改程序,就能在线更改菜单内容,使菜单变成一种由数据驱动的对象,本文介绍了该方法的实现原理。     

Adaptively shortened pull down menus: location knowledge and selection efficiency

Adaptively shortened pull down menus, as introduced by Microsoft with the ‘personalized menus’ in Office 2000? and assumed to speed up menu selection, are examined. Displacement of items in this adaptively changing menu is argued to conflict with the user's location knowledge, leading to increased selection times and error rates. In a controlled experiment with 31 subjects, a standard menu was compared with a shortened and a gapped menu variant. The gapped menu variant served to distinguish effects from displacement and effects resulting from reduced item number. Selection times and error rates were smaller for the standard menu than for the shortened variant. The gapped menu, whilst it has longer distances, was faster than the shortened menu, but slower than the standard menu. According to our findings, the assumption that adaptively shortened pull down menus facilitate menu selection is weakened.     

The importance of item distinctiveness on performance using a menu selection system

Novice computer users searched an interactive menu system given either an explicit target phrase or a subject-matter topic. Two menus were used: an original menu as designed by a commercial timesharing service and a slightly modified version intended to increase the distinctiveness of same-level items. Subjects acquired knowledge about the system through one of four study methods: trial-and-error exploration, study of a diagram of the menu structure, trial-and-error exploration with documentation, or study of the diagram with documentation. Subjects using the modified menu (a) took less time per problem: lpar;b) found targets in a more direct path: and (c) gave up on fewer problems than subjects using the original menu. These results are consistent with a theory of choice that predicts that decision processes are facilitated by the distinctiveness of the alternatives. Overall the effect of study method was not significant. For highly meaningful menus, type of exposure, whether trial-and-error or study of the global tree, does not seem to matter.     

Designing menus for the Chinese population: horizontal or vertical?

This research investigated the language differences between English and Chinese and the implication on the design of menu presentations for computer interfaces. Eighty Chinese subjects and twenty American subjects participated in this experiment. The results of this research indicated that the menu layout should be congruent with the language being used. Horizontal English menus result in better performance than vertical English menus. However, vertical Chinese menus result in better performance than horizontal Chinese menus. It is important to design menus based on the language being used rather than the linguistic traditions of the population using the interface. The effects of menu layout also depend on whether the search task items were presented in English or Chinese.     

Adapting menu layout to tasks

Menus are an increasingly popular style of user-system interface. Although many aspects of menu design can affect user performance (e.g. item names and selection methods), the organization of items in menus is a particularly salient aspect of their design. Unfortunately, empirical studies of menu layout have yet to resolve the basic question of how menus should be organized to produce optimal performance. Furthermore, a disturbingly common finding has been that any initial effects of menu layout disappear with practice. Thus it is tempting to conclude that menu organization is not important or that it only affects performance during learning. In this paper we present some reasons to doubt this conclusion. In particular, we have found persistent effects of layout with multiple-item selection tasks, in contrast with studies employing a single-item selection paradigm. The results of a controlled study comparing various menu designs (fast-food keyboards) show that the types of tasks to be performed by users must be considered in organizing items in menus and that there may be sustained effects of menu organization with some tasks. In addition, the results of this study support the use of a formal methodology based on user knowledge for menu design. By comparing the performance of subjects using menus designed using our methodology with the performance of subjects using “personalized” menus, we were able to demonstrate the general superiority of our method for designing menus, and for tailoring menus to meet task requirements as well.     

Integration of Adaptable and Adaptive Approaches for Interface Personalization Through Collaborative Menu

This article examines different user-system collaboration models in the adaptation of a menu interface. Four collaboration models were implemented on a prototype of mobile phone menu: (a) basic collaboration with no system support (for user adaptation) and no user control (over system adaptation), (b) system support only, (c) user control only, and (d) system support plus user control. The prototype mobile phone menu includes a hotlist (a quickly accessible collection of menu items) as well as a hierarchical menu. The hotlist is collaborative, because it combines adaptable and adaptive approaches by allowing both the user and the system to manage the items in it. A controlled experiment compared different types of collaborative menus in order to investigate the effects of system support and user control. Twenty participants performed menu selection tasks in the experiment, and both performance and subjective measures were taken. The results showed that, in a certain condition, the system support and the user control improved the user performance when applied independently, but their effects were not additive. Although the effects disappeared when the selection frequency distribution changed, the system support was preferred by most of the users. The advantages and disadvantages of the collaborative menus and implications for the adaptation of menus are discussed.     

Location of navigation menus in websites: an experimental study with Arabic users

While Arabic users represent by far the fastest growing language population on the Internet, research about how the peculiarities of Arabic language may shape users’ web interactions is still scarce. The preferences of Arabic users for menu location in websites have been studied. Two competing arguments have been proposed regarding the best location of menus in websites: conventional design (navigation menu should be placed on that side where users expect it based on previous experience) and reading direction (navigation menu should be placed on that side where readers are used to start off reading, so that the navigation menu is likely to be attended first). In an experiment, twenty-five participants with Arabic as mother language (who also spoke English) were briefly presented with screenshots from websites presented in Arabic or English and with menus located either on the left or the right, and rated their perceived visual appeal, usability, and trustworthiness. Results showed that participants judged the Arabic websites more positive when menus were located in the right- rather than in the left-hand side. In contrast, no differences for menu location were observed for English websites. These results are discussed in light of the conventional design and reading direction hypothesis and with regard to their implications for the design of Arabic websites.     

VoiceMarks: restructuring hierarchical voice menus for improving navigation

Interactive Voice Response (IVR) systems, or touch-tone telephony interfaces, are nowadays a common medium of interaction between organizations or companies and their customers, allowing users to access or enter specific company-based information. These telephony interfaces typically involve the use of hierarchically structured voice menus, through which a user has to navigate in order to locate a specific desired menu item. This navigation process is often inefficient and time-consuming, leaving users at times frustrated and annoyed. In this paper, we describe the foundation of VoiceMarks, a system designed to improve the ease and efficiency of navigation in menu-based voice interfaces. The system features personalized menus through the use of voicemarks, in a process similar to bookmarking, but adapted to voice interfaces. VoiceMarks are essentially bookmarked nodes in the voice menu hierarchy, which are stored for the respective user in a directly accessible, personal menu. We developed and tested VoiceMarks interfaces for two applications: a bus schedule information system and a cinema ticket purchase system. A comparative study of VoiceMarks and traditional interfaces of these applications showed that VoiceMarks can significantly improve the interaction between users and systems, in terms of time and number of keystrokes needed to locate a menu item, as well as regarding user satisfaction. In general, users responded very positively to the VoiceMarks interface. In addition, the study pointed to some useful modifications of VoiceMarks, which should be considered before employing the system in a commercial setting.     

The importance of item distinctiveness on performance using a menu selection system

Abstract

Novice computer users searched an interactive menu system given either an explicit target phrase or a subject-matter topic. Two menus were used: an original menu as designed by a commercial timesharing service and a slightly modified version intended to increase the distinctiveness of same-level items. Subjects acquired knowledge about the system through one of four study methods: trial-and-error exploration, study of a diagram of the menu structure, trial-and-error exploration with documentation, or study of the diagram with documentation. Subjects using the modified menu (a) took less time per problem: lpar;b) found targets in a more direct path: and (c) gave up on fewer problems than subjects using the original menu. These results are consistent with a theory of choice that predicts that decision processes are facilitated by the distinctiveness of the alternatives. Overall the effect of study method was not significant. For highly meaningful menus, type of exposure, whether trial-and-error or study of the global tree, does not seem to matter.     

Improving cascading menu selections with adaptive activation areas

Cascading menus are the most commonly used hierarchical menus in graphical user interfaces (GUIs). These menus, however, tend to have elongated paths with corner steering, which can result in navigation difficulties. To resolve the corner steering problem, most current cascading menus implement an explicit time delay between the cursor entering or leaving a parent menu item and posting/unposting the associated menu. In this paper, we present adaptive activation-area menus (AAMUs), a technique to improve cascading menu performance by providing a localized triangular activation area between the menu and the child submenu. This triangular activation area aims to overcome the corner steering problem by permitting quick diagonal navigation without imposing a time delay.We describe four experiments designed to refine and validate the AAMU technique. Our first experiment shows that AAMUs improve item selection performance in comparison to traditional menus and a number of competing techniques, including gesture-based menus and enlarged activation-area menus (EMUs). Our second and third experiments reveal, however, that in a searching task, where the user has to look through multiple submenus to find the target, the basic AAMU design suffers from a “cursor trapping” problem, where the user has to move the cursor out of the activation area prior to exploring another submenu. An evaluation of an improved AAMU design shows that it is as fast as or faster than traditional menus and EMUs for both selection and searching tasks.     

Correcting menu usability problems with sound

Future human-computer interfaces will use more than just graphical output to display information. In this paper we suggest that sound and graphics together can be used to improve interaction. We describe an experiment to improve the usability of standard graphical menus by the addition of sound. One common difficulty is slipping off a menu item by mistake when trying to select it. One of the causes of this is insufficient feedback. We designed and experimentally evaluated a new set of menus with much more salient audio feedback to solve this problem. The results from the experiment showed a significant reduction in the subjective effort required to use the new sonically-enhanced menus along with significantly reduced error recovery times. A significantly larger number of errors were also corrected with sound.     

Age differences in the performance of information retrieval tasks

In two experiments younger (18-25 years) and older (60-70 years) participants performed an information retrieval task in which they searched for the answers to questions in a hierarchical menu structure. Participants' movement speed, spatial ability, spatial memory, working memory capacity and reasoning speed were measured. Results showed older participants to be slower than younger participants on overall latencies on the information retrieval task. This slowing increases with each consecutive step in the menu structure. Regression analysis showed that movement speed, reasoning speed and spatial ability predicted the overall latencies accurately. Modelling the consecutive steps showed that latencies on the first selection are predicted by movement speed and reasoning speed. Memory and spatial measures are predictors for latencies on steps further into the menu structure only. This finding is consistent with increased slowing of older participants for later selections and suggests that deep menu structures are less suited for older users.     

VB自绘菜单流程分析

Visual Basic 6.0中使用"菜单编辑器"只能创建"平面"菜单,要得到附带图标、界面美观的菜单,需要调用API函数进行自绘菜单,而主菜单与下拉式菜单的触发事件不一样,需要响应不同的消息,使绘制的复杂性大大增加.在具体绘制过程中,首先确定消息机制,然后选取合适的API函数菜,对于菜单中经常使用的方框线条等基本图形先构造绘图函数,通过主函数调用绘图函数的方式来简化问题的复杂性,巧妙地实现了自绘菜单的期望效果.     

Age differences in the performance of information retrieval tasks

In two experiments younger (18-25 years) and older (60-70 years) participants performed an information retrieval task in which they searched for the answers to questions in a hierarchical menu structure. Participants' movement speed, spatial ability, spatial memory, working memory capacity and reasoning speed were measured. Results showed older participants to be slower than younger participants on overall latencies on the information retrieval task. This slowing increases with each consecutive step in the menu structure. Regression analysis showed that movement speed, reasoning speed and spatial ability predicted the overall latencies accurately. Modelling the consecutive steps showed that latencies on the first selection are predicted by movement speed and reasoning speed. Memory and spatial measures are predictors for latencies on steps further into the menu structure only. This finding is consistent with increased slowing of older participants for later selections and suggests that deep menu structures are less suited for older users.