Laboratoire d'Informatique de Grenoble Équipe Ingénierie de l'Interaction Homme-Machine

Équipe Ingénierie de l'Interaction
Homme-Machine

Visual Menu Techniques

In ACM Computing Surveys (CSUR) Vol. 49, Issue 4, January 2017, Article No. 60, Publication date: December 2016. 49(60). pages 41 pages. 2016.

Gilles Bailly, Éric Lecolinet, Laurence Nigay

Résumé

Menus 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. As properties have an impact on the performance of the menu, we start by refining performance through a list of quality criteria and by reviewing existing analytical and empirical methods for quality evaluation. This taxonomy of menu properties is a 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 then enable a fine-grained analysis in terms of performance.