Abstract
Building a usable menu bar, related pull-down menus and submenus or cascaded menus remains an important design activity in the development of interactive applications, especially in the domain of business oriented ones. To provide some assistance to designers who are responsible for achieving this task, a two-phased design method for a menu bar and related pull-down menus is presented. Based on a entity-relationship model of the final application, a first phase automatically generates an initial menu tree; a second phase enables designers to interactively perform refinement operations on the initial tree to obtain a final menu tree. This tree can be finally exported to a graphical editor for free editing and adaptation. This method covers the selection and the positioning of menu items, a first proposal for mnemonics and accelerators that are intrinsically based of menu design guidelines.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
References
H. Balzert, F. Hofmann, V. Kruschinski, C. Niemann. The Janus Application Development Environment-Generating More than the User Interface. In J. Vanderdonckt (ed.): Proc. of the 2nd Int. Workshop on Computer-Aided Design of User Interfaces CADUI’96 (Namur, June 5–7, 1996 ). Namur: Presses Universitaires de Namur, 1996, pp. 183–206.
F. Bodart, A.-M. Hennebert, J.-M. Leheureux, I. Provot, J. Vanderdonckt: A Model-based Approach to Presentation: A Continuum from Task Analysis to Prototype. In F. Paternè (ed.): Proc. of 1st Eurographics Workshop on Design, Specification, Verification of Interactive Systems DSV-IS’94 (Carrara, June 8–10, 1994). Berlin: Springer-Verlag: Focus on Computer Graphics 1995, pp. 77 - 94. Available at http://www.info.fundp.ac.be/cgi-publi/pub-spec-paper?RP-94-023.
D.A. Duce, M.R. Gomes, F.R.A. Hopgood, J.R. Lee: User Interface Management and Design. In Proc. of the Workshop on User Interface Management Systems and Environments (Lisbon, June 4–6, 1990 ). Berlin: Springer-Verlag 1991.
W.K. Horton. Designing & Writing On line Documentation - Help files to Hypertext. Chichester: John Wiley & Sons, 1990.
J.I. Kiger. The depth/breadth tradeoff in the design of menu driven user interfaces. International Journal of Man-Machine Studies. Vol. 20. No. 2. February 1984, pp. 201213.
K.L. Norman. The Psychology of Menu Selection: Designing Cognitive Control at the Human/Computer Interface. Norwood: Ablex Publishing Corp. 1991.
D.R. Olsen. MIKE: The Menu Interaction Kontrol Environment. ACM Transactions on Graphics. Vol. 5. No. 4. Octobre 1986, pp. 318–344.
D.R. Olsen. A Programming Language Basis for User Interface Management. In K. Bice, C. Lewis (eds.): Proc. of the ACM Conf. on Human Factors in Computing Systems CHI’89 (Austin, 30 April-4 May 1989). New York: ACM Press 1989, pp. 171176.
K.R. Paap, R.J. Roske-Hofstrand. The Optimal Number of Menu Options per Panel. Human Factors. Vol. 28. No. 4. August 1986, pp. 377–385.
K.A. Parng, V.S. Ellingstad. Menuda: A Knowledge-Based Menu Design Expert System. In M. Galer, S. Harker et J. Ziegler (eds.): Proc. of the 31st Annual Meeting of the Human Factors Society HFS’87. Santa Monica: Human Factors Society 1987, pp. 1315–1319.
I. Petoud, Y. Pigneur: An Automatic and Visual Approach for User Interface Design. In G. Cockton (ed.): Proceedings of the IFIP TC 2/WG 2.7 Working Conference on Engineering for Human-Computer Interaction EHCI’89 (Napa Valley, 21–25 August 1989 ). Amsterdam: Elsevier Science Publishers B.V., 1990, pp. 403–419.
P. Shoval. Functional Design of a Menu-Tree Interface within Structured System Development. International Journal of Man-Machine Studies. Vol. 33. No. 5. November 1990, pp. 537–556.
J.L. Sibert, J.D. Foley. User-Computer Interface Design. Tutorial #1, Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems CHI’90. Seattle, April 1, 1990.
J. Whiteside, S. Jones, P.S. Levy, D. Wixon. User Performance with Command, Menu, and Iconic Interfaces. In L. Borman & B. Curtis (eds.): Proceedings of the ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems CHI’85 (San Francisco, 14–18 April 1985 ). New York: ACM Press 1985, pp. 185–191.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 1999 Springer-Verlag/Wien
About this paper
Cite this paper
Vanderdonckt, J. (1999). Computer-Aided Design of Menu Bar and Pull-Down Menus for Business Oriented Applications. In: Duke, D., Puerta, A. (eds) Design, Specification and Verification of Interactive Systems ’99. Eurographics. Springer, Vienna. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-7091-6815-8_7
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-7091-6815-8_7
Publisher Name: Springer, Vienna
Print ISBN: 978-3-211-83405-3
Online ISBN: 978-3-7091-6815-8
eBook Packages: Springer Book Archive