Path: utzoo!attcan!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!gem.mps.ohio-state.edu!ginosko!uunet!yale!cs.yale.edu 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. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Sean Philip Engelson, Poet Errant Make your learning a fixture; Yale Department of Computer Science Say little and do much; Box 2158 Yale Station And receive everyone with New Haven, CT 06520 a kindly attitude. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Esperanto: la metodo por krei paca mondo. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- I see the eigenvalue in thine eye, I hear the tender tensor in thy sigh. Bernoulli would have been content to die Had he but known such a^2 cos 2(phi)! --Stanislaw Lem, "Cyberiad"