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From: engelson@cs.yale.edu (Sean Engelson)
Newsgroups: comp.cog-eng
Subject: Re: Menu Interaction Techniques
Message-ID: <618@cs.yale.edu>
Date: 26 Sep 89 15:02:27 GMT
References: <2722@trantor.harris-atd.com> <16179@brunix.UUCP>
Sender: news@cs.yale.edu
Reply-To: engelson@cs.yale.edu (Sean Engelson)
Organization: Computer Science, Yale University, New Haven, CT 06520-2158
Lines: 38
In-reply-to: jhc@iris.brown.edu (James H. Coombs)

In article <16179@brunix.UUCP>, jhc@iris (James H. Coombs) writes:
>In article <2722@trantor.harris-atd.com> chuck@melmac.harris-atd.com
>(Chuck Musciano) writes:
>
>> I contended that each menu usage would require a visual
>> search and explicit select action, making it harder to use.
>
>I have seen no research on this, so I will offer an observation.  I 
>frequently find that I select the wrong item or no item at all when
>I attempt to select from a menu without focusing my vision on the
>desired item.  I have not experienced the equivalent of touch typing
>with menu selection.  D. A. Norman is right on target: menus are
>optimized for selection but pessimized for performance.

Supposedly there's been some research that's shown that pie-menus
(menus with selections in wedges around a circle) allow muscular
memory to take over.  My experience with pie-menus under NeWS bore
this out---I could just click-move-click-move-click (for nested menus)
and get exactly what I wanted, even if the menus hadn't even popped up
yet (due to the slowness of the window system).  Regular menus require
search, and precise positioning, while pie-menus require only
directional information, which is easier to remember.



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Yale Department of Computer Science	Say little and do much;
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