Path: utzoo!utgpu!water!watmath!watcgl!drforsey From: drforsey@watcgl.waterloo.edu (Dave Forsey) Newsgroups: comp.cog-eng Subject: Re: Using kinesthetic memory for human interfaces Message-ID: <4988@watcgl.waterloo.edu> Date: 24 Jun 88 20:04:20 GMT References: <3535@pdn.uucp>Reply-To: drforsey@watcgl.waterloo.edu (Dave Forsey) Organization: U. of Waterloo, Ontario Lines: 67 In article eric@snark.UUCP (Eric S. Raymond) writes: >In article <3535@pdn.uucp>, colin@pdn.UUCP (Colin Kendall) writes: >>The experience has deepened my respect for muscular memory, >>Studies have shown that >>after a little practice, users of these menus no longer need to >>look at the screen while making menu selections, even complicated >>cascades of selections!) > >This suggests a more general question. What can we do (besides pie menus, which >I agree are neat) to maximize the extent to which the user's model of routine >operations is embedded in kinesthetic memory (NLP, anyone ;-)?). > We've been using some sort of radial selection menus since '84, and my personal experience indicates that even 4 or 5 ( 7 +- 2? ) levels of hierarchy is still quite managable without much cognitive burden. I don't know if this (subjective) feature would offset the limits that pie menus have (i.e. it is hard to put 15 items around in a circle and have people select easily). They seem (to me) to be an order of magnitude easier to use than these menus in which you slide the cursor off the item to one side to pop-up the next level of the hierarchy. A significant speed-up occurs after using a set of menus for a period of time. Careful arrangement of the menu items can aid in this. (as Callahan, Hopkins, Weiser and Shniederman (CHI '88), have noted). I'm not sure that the raw speed increase is as important as the ease in which they can be used. I hardly even look at the items on the menu anymore, just the overal appearance (which differ in size according to the number of items and the length of the words contained therein) seems to be enough to guide my choices. I've had no experience with the Callahan et al style, but in our version the sub-menu pops up when the cursor enters any part of the pie sector (no additional button action is required). As an aside with regards to the automatic cursor motion question, when the sub-menu pops up the cursor moves to accommodate the new menu position, but since i'm operating mainly through a gesture this does not seem to bother me. (How one might quantify this effect and test it is not clear). I tend to think of radial selection menus as gesture recognition with visual feedback. Many will remember the character recognizers that researchers were trying a couple years back. Buxton out of the University of Toronto had a pilot system in which the menu selections were made by the system recognizing gestures made by the user on the screen. Hierarchical radial selection menus have the potential to provide a very similar function since equivalent "gestures" will take you to the same menu item. This ability will of course vary with the target size etc, and some gestures will be easier to do than others (noted again by Callahan et al.) and all these extra variables will mean that the efficacy of the pie menus will be highly dependent on the skill of the interface designer (this is not news). Terry Higgins, formerly of this lab, demonstrated a paint system with radial selection menus (that also featured mouse-ahead and couple of other interesting ideas) at SIGGRAPH '87 last year. This year i'll probably have a couple systems at the iris users forum that use a type of pie menu. Not as nice as Terry's, but functional for the purposes of the programs. Dave Forsey Computer Graphics Laboratory University of Waterloo Waterloo Ont. CANADA