Supporting menu design with radial layouts

Navigation Time Variability: Measuring Menu Navigation Errors

“…Navigation is an important part of menu selection. Novices and experts can spend between 20-50% of the total selection time on navigation [11].…”

“…Some menus employ a point-and-click interaction style [11], others a dragging interaction style [8]. Some menus restrict navigation trajectory when moving between the sub-menus, others do not [4,12].…”

“…The second menu was the Compact Radial Layout menu (CRL) [11] which we chose because it was designed specifically to decrease navigation errors by the means of eliminating dwelling, eliminating steering, decreasing navigation distances, increasing item sizes, and not restricting navigation paths. The implemented CRL menu was equivalent to that presented in [11].…”

“…There has been a great deal of research into alternative menu designs, including numerous cascading menu improvements [1,4,7,12], radial menus [11], marking menus [8], and much more.…”

“…When it comes to errors, it turns out that the error rates are low, typically below 5% (e.g., [1,4,5,11,12]). The error rates are often not significantly different for tested designs.…”