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AAMU: adaptive activation area menus for improving selection in cascading pull-down menus

Published:06 April 2008Publication History

ABSTRACT

Selecting items in cascading pull-down menus is a frequent task in most GUIs. These selections involve two major components: steering and selection, with the steering component being the most time-consuming and error-prone. We describe a new technique, called Adaptive Activation-Area Menu (AAMU) that eliminate corner steering. AAMUs contain an enlarged activation area which dynamically resizes itself providing a broader steering path for menu navigation. We also combined AAMUs with Force-field menus, to create Force-AAMUs. We empirically demonstrate that AAMUs and Force-AAMUs outperformed the current default menu. We also compared performances of various other menus including Enlarged activation area menus (EMUs) and Gesture based selection with mouse as an input device. Overall, users show higher satisfaction rates for AAMUs over other menu designs.

References

  1. Ahlstrom, D. Modeling and improving selection in cascading pull­down menus using fitts' law, the steering law and force fields In Proc. CHI '05, 61--70, 2006. Google ScholarGoogle ScholarDigital LibraryDigital Library
  2. Cockburn, A. and Gin, A. Faster cascading menu selections with enlarged activation areas. In Proc. GI'06, 65--71, 2006. Google ScholarGoogle ScholarDigital LibraryDigital Library
  3. Findlater, L. and McGrenere, J. A comparison of static, adaptive, and adaptable menus. In Proc. CHI '04, 89--96, 2004. Google ScholarGoogle ScholarDigital LibraryDigital Library
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  5. Pastel, R. Measuring the difficulty of steering through corners. In Proc. CHI '06, 1087--1096, 2006. Google ScholarGoogle ScholarDigital LibraryDigital Library
  6. Sears, A. and Shneiderman, B. Split menus: Effectively using selection frequency to organize menus. ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction (TOCHI), 1(1):27--51, 1994. Google ScholarGoogle ScholarDigital LibraryDigital Library

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  1. AAMU: adaptive activation area menus for improving selection in cascading pull-down menus

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    • Published in

      cover image ACM Conferences
      CHI '08: Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
      April 2008
      1870 pages
      ISBN:9781605580111
      DOI:10.1145/1357054

      Copyright © 2008 ACM

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      Association for Computing Machinery

      New York, NY, United States

      Publication History

      • Published: 6 April 2008

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      CHI '08 Paper Acceptance Rate157of714submissions,22%Overall Acceptance Rate6,199of26,314submissions,24%

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