Menus and toolbars are the primary controls for issuing
commands in modern interfaces. As software systems
continue to support increasingly large command sets, the
user's task of locating the desired command control is
progressively time consuming. Many factors influence a
user's ability to visually search for and select a target in a
set of menus or toolbars, one of which is the degree of parallelism
in the display arrangement. A fully parallel layout
will show all commands at once, allowing the user to visually
scan all items without needing to manipulate the interface,
but there is a risk that this will harm performance due
to excessive visual clutter. At the other extreme, a fully
serial display minimises visual clutter by displaying only
one item at a time, but separate interface manipulations
are necessary to display each item. This paper examines
the effects of increasing the number of items displayed
to users in menus through parallelism-displaying multiple
menus simultaneously, spanning both horizontally and
vertically-and compares it to traditional menus and pure
serial display menus. We found that moving from serial
to a partially parallel (traditional) menu significantly improved
user performance, but moving from a partially parallel
to a fully parallel menu design had more ambiguous
results. The results have direct design implications for the
layout of command interfaces. |
| Cite as: Quinn, P. and Cockburn, A. (2008). The Effects of Menu Parallelism on Visual Search and Selection. In Proc. Ninth Australasian User Interface Conference (AUIC 2008), Wollongong, NSW, Australia. CRPIT, 76. Plimmer, B. and Weber, G., Eds. ACS. 79-84. |
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