AAMU: adaptive activation area menus for improving selection in cascading pull-down menus

Abstract

Selecting items in cascading pull-down menus is a frequent task in most GUIs. These selections involve two major components: steering and selection, with the steering component being the most time-consuming and error-prone. We describe a new technique, called Adaptive Activation-Area Menu (AAMU) that eliminate corner steering. AAMUs contain an enlarged activation area which dynamically resizes itself providing a broader steering path for menu navigation. We also combined AAMUs with Force-field menus, to create Force-AAMUs. We empirically demonstrate that AAMUs and Force-AAMUs outperformed the current default menu. We also compared performances of various other menus including Enlarged activation area menus (EMUs) and Gesture based selection with mouse as an input device. Overall, users show higher satisfaction rates for AAMUs over other menu designs.

Publisher Link

https://doi.org/10.1145/1357054.1357270

Citation

Erum Tanvir, Jonathan Cullen, Pourang Irani, and Andy Cockburn. 2008. AAMU: adaptive activation area menus for improving selection in cascading pull-down menus. In Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI '08). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 1381–1384. DOI:https://doi.org/10.1145/1357054.1357270

Bibtext Entry

@inproceedings{10.1145/1357054.1357270,
author = {Tanvir, Erum and Cullen, Jonathan and Irani, Pourang and Cockburn, Andy},
title = {AAMU: Adaptive Activation Area Menus for Improving Selection in Cascading Pull-down Menus},
year = {2008},
isbn = {9781605580111},
publisher = {Association for Computing Machinery},
address = {New York, NY, USA},
url = {https://doi.org/10.1145/1357054.1357270},
doi = {10.1145/1357054.1357270},
abstract = {Selecting items in cascading pull-down menus is a frequent task in most GUIs. These selections involve two major components: steering and selection, with the steering component being the most time-consuming and error-prone. We describe a new technique, called Adaptive Activation-Area Menu (AAMU) that eliminate corner steering. AAMUs contain an enlarged activation area which dynamically resizes itself providing a broader steering path for menu navigation. We also combined AAMUs with Force-field menus, to create Force-AAMUs. We empirically demonstrate that AAMUs and Force-AAMUs outperformed the current default menu. We also compared performances of various other menus including Enlarged activation area menus (EMUs) and Gesture based selection with mouse as an input device. Overall, users show higher satisfaction rates for AAMUs over other menu designs.},
booktitle = {Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems},
pages = {1381–1384},
numpages = {4},
keywords = {menu navigation, cascading pull-down menus, steering, selection, force-aamu, aamu, force field menus},
location = {Florence, Italy},
series = {CHI '08}
}