A Comparative Study Of Novel Menu Item Grouping Techniques For Dynamic Menus

Menu is an essential widget in human-computer interfaces. Item grouping cues are valuable for target visual search in a menu. In traditional static menus, logically related items are typically grouped by dividing lines. However, the static grouping cues are usually lost in dynamic menus. In this thesis, we introduce seven novel item grouping cues for dynamic menus, i.e. different background colors, different foreground colors, different icons, different numbers, different signs, different font families and different fill styles for different item groups. A quantitative experiment was done to compare seven adaptive menus with the proposed grouping cues with a typical adaptive split menu and a traditional static menu. The experimental results reveal that the menu with background grouping cues outperformed the other eight in speed, followed by the menu with foreground grouping cues, and there was significant differences between the nine types of menu designs on accuracy. Most subjects preferred the background menu design for its better visual effect.