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Barrel menu: a new mobile phone menu for feature rich devices

Published: 03 October 2011 Publication History

Abstract

Mobile phones have ceased to be devices that people merely use to make phone calls. Today, modern mobile phones offer their users a large selection of features which are accessed via hierarchical menus. These hierarchical menus typically result in deep nested menus that require numerous clicks to navigate through, often resulting in usability issues. This paper presents a prototype of a new menu style (Barrel menu) for mobile phones, and compares the usability of this menu style with that of a traditional hierarchical (Hub-and-Spoke) design. The Barrel menu was found to be as efficient as the Hub-and-Spoke menu in terms of time-on-task and key presses, but was found to cause fewer user errors. In addition, the Barrel menu was found to be better in terms of ease of use, orientation, user satisfaction and learnability. Thus, the Barrel menu shows the potential to be a feasible alternative for mobile phone manufacturers to overcome some of the usability issues associated with Hub-and-Spoke menus.

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Cited By

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  • (2023)Voicify Your UIProceedings of the ACM on Interactive, Mobile, Wearable and Ubiquitous Technologies10.1145/35819987:1(1-22)Online publication date: 28-Mar-2023
  • (2017)LINEUp: List Navigation Using Edge MenuIntelligent Human Computer Interaction10.1007/978-3-319-72038-8_8(86-106)Online publication date: 1-Dec-2017

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cover image ACM Other conferences
SAICSIT '11: Proceedings of the South African Institute of Computer Scientists and Information Technologists Conference on Knowledge, Innovation and Leadership in a Diverse, Multidisciplinary Environment
October 2011
352 pages
ISBN:9781450308786
DOI:10.1145/2072221
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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  • University of Cape Town
  • SAICSIT: So. African Inst. Of Computer Scientists & Info Tecnologists

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Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 03 October 2011

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Author Tags

  1. mobile interaction
  2. mobile phone menus
  3. mobile phone usability

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SAICSIT '11
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  • SAICSIT

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Overall Acceptance Rate 187 of 439 submissions, 43%

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Cited By

View all
  • (2023)Voicify Your UIProceedings of the ACM on Interactive, Mobile, Wearable and Ubiquitous Technologies10.1145/35819987:1(1-22)Online publication date: 28-Mar-2023
  • (2017)LINEUp: List Navigation Using Edge MenuIntelligent Human Computer Interaction10.1007/978-3-319-72038-8_8(86-106)Online publication date: 1-Dec-2017

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