Research of Menu Item Grouping Techniques for Dynamic Menus

Abstract

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 paper, we introduce two novel item grouping cues for dynamic menus, i.e. different background and foreground colors for different item groups. A quantitative experiment was done to compare two adaptive menus with the proposed grouping cues with a typical adaptive split menu. The experimental results reveal that the menu with foreground grouping cues outperformed the other two in speed, and there was no significant difference between the three types of menu designs on accuracy. Most subjects preferred the foreground menu design for its better visual effect.