Modeling and Improving Selection in Cascading Pull-Down Menus Using Fitts' Law, the Steering Law and Force Fields

摘要

Selecting a menu item in a cascading pull-down menu is a frequent but time consuming and complex GUI task. This paper describes an approach aimed to support the user during selection in cascading pull-down menus when using an indirect pointing device. By enhancing such a cascading pulldown menu with "force fields", the cursor is attracted toward a certain direction, e.g. toward the right hand side within a menu item, which opens up a sub-menu, making the cursor steering task easier and faster. The experiment described here shows that the force fields can decrease selection times, on average by 18%, when a mouse, a track point, or touch pad is used as input device. The results also suggest that selection times in cascading pull-down menus can be modeled using a combination of Pitts' law and the steering law. The proposed model proved to hold for all three devices, in both standard and in enhanced cascading pull-down menus, with correlations better than r{sup}2 = 0.90.