Ergonomic Study Of Mobile Menu Types

The study of different types of menu is an important domain in Human-Computer Interaction study. In recent years, as mobile phones have been more and more popular and widely used, it is necessary to investigate the mobile menu interface systematically. In our study, we first compared three most popular mobile menus, then, on the basis of which, we selected the menu of the best performance and improved it with adaptive and adaptable techniques, and studied the impact of the cognitive style on user's performance on those improved menus. This study consisted of five experiments in three phases. In the first phase, experiment 1 and 2 determined the best menu in terms of performance, which is hierarchical menu. In second phase, experiment 3 and 4 examined the application of adaptive and adaptable techniques and its impact on user's performance and satisfaction. In the third phase, experiment 5 conducted a user research on those menus. In addition, we proposed several menu interface design principles based on the experimental studies. Based on our experiments' results, we drew the following conclusions:1. Among hierarchical, scrolling and pagign menus, hierachical menu has the best performance and paging menu has the best satisfaction.2. Adding adaptable fuction to the main interface of the menu could improve user experience and performance.3. Adding shortcut to hierarchical menu could save the steps of operation and improve the performance and satisfaction in the shortcut and, meanwhile, lower the performance in the main menu.4. For the performance in the shortcut area, the adaptable menu is better than the adaptive menu.5. Cognitive style may influence user's preference on menu types. Majority users who prefer the adaptable menu are more field independent.6. Cognitive style could impact user's performance on the shortcut. The users who are more field independent performed better than the more dependent users.