Looking my way through the menu: the impact of menu design and multimodal input on gaze-based menu selection

ABSTRACT

In this paper a study is reported, which investigates the effectiveness of two approaches to improving gaze-based interaction for realistic and complex menu selection tasks. The first approach focuses on identifying menu designs for hierarchical menus that are particularly suitable for gaze-based interaction, whereas the second approach is based on the idea of combining gaze-based interaction with speech as a second input modality. In an experiment with 40 participants the impact of menu design, input device, and navigation complexity on accuracy and completion time in a menu selection task as well as on user satisfaction were investigated. The results concerning both objective task performance and subjective ratings confirmed our expectations in that a semi-circle menu was better suited for gaze-based menu selection than either a linear or a full-circle menu. Contrary to our expectations, an input device solely based on eye gazes turned out to be superior to the combined gaze- and speech-based device. Moreover, the drawbacks of a less suitable menu design (i.e., of a linear menu or a full-circle menu) as well as of the multimodal input device particularly obstructed performance in the case of more complex navigational tasks.

References

1. Beinhauer, W. 2006. In Proceedings of the 2006 Symposium on Eye Tracking Research & Applications. ETRA 2006. ACM, New York, NY, 53--53.
2. Callahan, J., Hopkins, D., Weiser, M., and Shneiderman, B. 1988. An empirical comparison of pie vs. linear menus. In Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. J. J. O'Hare, Ed. CHI 88. ACM, New York, NY, 95--100.
3. Hart, S. G. and Staveland, L. E. 1988. Development of the NASA-tlx (Task Load Index): Results of empirical and theoretical research, in Human Mental Workload, 139--183.
4. ISO 9241-11 1998. Ergonomic requirements for office work with visual display terminals (VDT)s - Part 11 Guidance on usability.
5. Jacob, R. J. K. 1990. What you look at is what you get: eye movement-based interaction techniques. In Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems: Empowering. J. C. Chew and J. Whiteside, Eds. CHI 90. ACM, New York, NY, 11--18.
6. Jacob, R. J. K. 1993. Eye movement-based human-computer interaction techniques: Toward non-command interfaces. In H. R. Hartson & D. Hix (Eds.), Advances in human-computer interaction (Vol. 4, pp. 151--190). Norwood, NJ: Ablex. Available at http://www.eecs.tufts.edu/~jacob/papers/hartson.pdf (05.11.2007).
7. Kaur, M., Tremaine, M., Huang, N., Wilder, J., Gacovski, Z., Flippo, F., and Mantravadi, C. S. 2003. Where is "it"? Event Synchronization in Gaze-Speech Input Systems. In Proceedings of the 5th international Conference on Multimodal interfaces. ICMI 2003. ACM, New York, NY, 151--158.
8. Kobayashi, M. and Igarashi, T. 2003. Considering the direction of cursor movement for efficient traversal of cascading menus. In Proceedings of the 16th Annual ACM Symposium on User interface Software and Technology. UIST 2003. ACM, New York, NY, 91--94.
9. Kurtenbach, G. and Buxton, W. 1994. In Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems: Celebrating interdependence. B. Adelson, S. Dumais, and J. Olson, Eds. CHI 94. ACM, New York, NY, 258--264.
10. Miniotas, D., Špakov, O., Tugoy, I., and MackKenzie, I. S. 2005. Extending the limits for gaze pointing through the use of speech. Information Technology and Control, 34, 225--230.
11. Ohno, T. 1998. Features of eye gaze interface for selection tasks. In Proceedings of the third Asia Pacific computer human interaction. APCHI 98, IEEE Computer Society, Washington, DC, 176--182.
12. Tobii Technology, AB, 2006. Tobii 1750 Eye Tracker. Sweden. http://www.tobii.com
13. Urbina, M. H. and Huckauf, A. 2007. Dwell time free eye typing approaches. In Proceedings of the 3rd Conference on Communication by Gaze Interaction - COGAIN 2007. Leicester, UK, 65--70.
14. Velichkovsky, B. M., Sprenger, A., and Pomplun, M. 1997. Auf dem Weg zur Blickmaus: Die Beeinflussung der Fixationsdauer durch kognitive und kommunikative Aufgaben. In R. Liskowsky, B. M. Velichkowsky, & W. Wüünschmann (Eds.), Software-Ergonomie, 317--327.
15. Yamato, M., Monden, A., Matsumoto, K., Inoue, K., and Torii, K. 2000. Quick button selection with eye gazing for general GUI environment. In Proceedings of International Conference on Software: Theory and Practice, ICS 2000. Beijing, China, 712--719.
16. Zhai, S., Morimoto, C., and Ihde, S. 1999. Manual and gaze input cascaded (MAGIC) pointing. In Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems: the CHI is the Limit. CHI 99. ACM, New York, NY, 246--253.

Index Terms

• Human-centered computing

  • Human computer interaction (HCI)