Wing Expansion Menu - An approach for faster and more precise navigation with cascading pull-down menus
This addresses faster and more precise navigation for users of graphical interfaces, but it is incremental as it builds on existing steering law principles.
The paper tackles the problem of slow navigation in cascading pull-down menus by proposing the Wing Expansion Menu (WEM), which resulted in an average improvement of 18.63% in user interaction speed compared to standard menus.
This paper presents a new design suggestion for cascading pull-down menus to make user interaction with it faster and therefore easier: The Wing Expansion Menu (WEM). The proposal is based on the Steering Law, which implies a wider steering path for menu items. Our Approach combines this enlargement with a heuristic function that provides a probability with which the user will select an menu item. The menu can also be adapted to a wide variety of situations using certain variables. A user study of a WEM against a standard pull-down menu showed an average improvement of 18.63% in user interaction speed. A second user study, which evaluated one of the significant innovations of the WEM compared to a similar approach, showed an average improvement of 7.01% in user interaction speed.