Visual Menu Techniques

Abstract

International audienceMenus are used for exploring and selecting commands in interactive applications. They are widespread in current systems and used by a large variety of users. As a consequence, they have motivated many studies in Human-Computer Interaction (HCI). Facing the large variety of menus, it is difficult to have a clear understanding of the design possibilities and to ascertain their similarities and differences. In this article, we address a main challenge of menu design: the need to characterize the design space of menus. To do this, we propose a taxonomy of menu properties that structures existing work on visual menus. In order to highlight the impact of the properties on performance, we begin by refining performance through a list of quality criteria and by reviewing existing analytical and empirical methods for quality evaluation. The taxonomy of menu properties is an unavoidable step toward the elaboration of advanced predictive models of menu performance and the optimization of menus. A key point of this work is to focus both on menus and on the properties of menus, to enable a fine-grained analysis in terms of performance

Sam

“…This solution has been transposed from a single menu to the whole menu system [11]. Other approaches increase the saliency of some items by manipulating the size [4], the transparency [1], the background colour [20], or the delay of apparition [5,9] of the items. Except [7], which studied three different menu adaptation styles and two policies, previous works generally rely on one "simple" target policy (i.e.…”

“…Most graphical toolkits (e.g. Java Swing, Qt) only provide limited support for customisation [1]. Our goal is to support effective (re)use of theoretical Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page.…”

An Evaluation of Discrete and Continuous Mid-Air Loop and Marking Menu Selection in Optical See-Through HMDs

“…Gesture design and gesture-based menu design have been extensively researched in the past. Dachselt and Hubner [12] surveyed previous 3D menu applications, Cheng et al [11] reviewed recent research activities with 3D hand recognition using depth sensors and Bailly et al [5] analyzed visual menu techniques. Zhai et al [43] reviewed gestural stroke-based user interfaces while Delamare et al [13] surveyed existing gesture guiding systems and provided an online tool assisting designers to quickly identify and compare current solutions that match their required design specifications.…”

Rationalizing the Need of Architecture-Driven Testing of Interactive Systems

“…However, that work (and what was done later on) remained focused on WIMP interfaces [39] while the field of HCI has been proposing much more efficient and complex interaction techniques (e.g. the survey on menu techniques in [5]). More recently, research work on software programming of interactive applications [25] proposed methods and tools to automatically reveal bad programming practices but this covers only a very small part of the interactive software (the event-handlers and their structuring).…”