Why It’s Quick to be Square: Modelling New and Existing Hierarchical Menu Designs

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Abstract

We consider different hierarchical menu and toolbar-like interface designs from a theoretical perspective and show how a model based on visual search time, pointing time, decision time and expertise development can assist in understanding and predicting interaction performance. Three hierarchical menus designs are modelled – a traditional pull-down menu, a pie menu and a novel Square Menu with its items arranged in a grid – and the predictions are validated in an empirical study. The model correctly predicts the relative performance of the designs – both the eventual dominance of Square Menus compared to traditional and pie designs and a performance crossover as users gain experience. Our work shows the value of modelling in HCI design, provides new insights about performance with different hierarchical menu designs, and demonstrates a new high-performance menu type.

Publisher Link

http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/1753326.1753534

Citation

David Ahlström, Andy Cockburn, Carl Gutwin and Pourang Irani. 2010. Why It's Quick to be Square: Modelling New and Existing Hierarchical Menu Designs. In Proceedings of the 28th international conference on Human factors in computing systems (CHI '10). Atlanta, Georgia, USA. ACM, 1371-1380.

Bibtext Entry

@INPROCEEDINGS { Ahlstrom10,
    AUTHOR = { David Ahlström and Andy Cockburn and Carl Gutwin and Pourang Irani },
    TITLE = { Why It's Quick to be Square: Modelling New and Existing Hierarchical Menu Designs },
    BOOKTITLE = { Proceedings of the 28th international conference on Human factors in computing systems (CHI '10) },
    YEAR = { 2010 },
    PAGES = { 1371--1380 },
    DOI = { 10.1145/1753326.1753534 },
    PUBLISHER = { ACM },
    ADDRESS = { Atlanta, Georgia, USA },
}