Research Of Menu Item Grouping Techniques For Dynamic Menus

With the advent of the information age, the computer has become an indispensable tool for daily interaction. In a human-computer interaction system, to make the interface systems of computer and the human "more friendly", the scientists have developed many simple interactive systems, such as the pen based interface, the touch interface etc... A menu interactive system is an important and necessary part in the interactive system, its research value and application value has attracted more and more researchers’attention.Menus are the most important widgets of the human-computer interfaces. Logically related items are typically grouped by separate lines in a static menu. Menu groups are valuable for users during finding out the target item. Dynamic menus usually enhance interactive performance by reducing motion space of active menu items. However, logically related items cannot be always adjacently located in dynamic menus for dynamic rearrangement. In this paper, with the dynamic adjustment of menu (the higher frequency menu item arrange the top position of the menu), we propose two novel menu grouping techniques (i.e. background menu grouping technique and foreground menu grouping technique) for dynamic menus. A quantitative experiment is executed to compare the proposed techniques with an adaptive split menu, which is a typical dynamic menu. The experimental date show the background menu grouping technique outperforms the other two techniques.