Extending Marking Menus With Integral Dimensions: Application to the Dartboard Menu

Mathieu Nancel (1) , Michel Beaudouin-Lafon (1)

1 LRI - Laboratoire de Recherche en Informatique

Marking menus have many benefits, including fast selection time, low error rate and fast transition to expert mode, but these are mitigated by a practical limit of 8 items per menu. Adding hierarchical levels increases capacity, but at the expense of longer selection times and higher error rates. In this paper we introduce Extended Marking Menus, a variant of marking menus that increases their width without sacrificing performance. Extended marking menus organize the items in several rings or layers. Selection is achieved by simultaneous control of direction, as in traditional marking menus, and another dimension such as distance, speed or pressure. We examine the design space of these new menus and study the Distance Extended Marking Menu, or Dartboard Menu, in more detail. We report on two experiments, one to calibrate the sizes of the rings, the other showing that it performs faster than the Zone and Flower menus but is less accurate than the Zone menu.

Mots clés: Dartboard menus; Marking Menus; Gestural interactions; Pen-based interactions; Fitts' Law

Domaines: Interface homme-machine [cs.HC]

Mathieu Nancel, Michel Beaudouin-Lafon. Extending Marking Menus With Integral Dimensions: Application to the Dartboard Menu. [Research Report] LRI - CNRS, University Paris-Sud; Inria. 2009. ⟨hal-01523310⟩