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Insights from Human Factors International
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In This Issue Bob Bailey reviews:
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Menu Selection
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What can we do to speed-up website interactions?
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Cognitive modeling demonstrates how people use
and anticipate location knowledge of menu items, Hornof, A.J. and
Kieras, D.E., CHI 99 Conference Proceedings, 410-417 (1999).
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Anthony Hornof and David Kieras at the University of Michigan conducted
a series of studies to evaluate how people select items from familiar
pull-down menus. One of their most surprising findings was that people
made an initial eye and hand movement to an anticipated target location
without waiting for the menu to appear. In other words, they made their
initial mouse positioning movements before ever seeing the menu. They
seem to know either the exact or an approximate location of items before
the menu appeared.
They also found that even after considerable use of familiar menus, users
continue to select the top items reliably faster than the other items.
This is because users are better able to anticipate the position of items
that appear toward the top of menus. Items that are located in one of
the first three positions seem to be the easiest for users to predict.
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Eye tracking the visual search of click-down menus,
Byrne, M.D., Anderson J.R., Douglass, S. and Matessa, M., CHI 99 Conference
Proceedings, 402-409 (1999).
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Michael Byrne, John Anderson, Scott Douglas and Michael Matessa at Carnegie
Mellon University conducted research (using eye-tracking methods) to better
understand how users deal with finding items in unfamiliar pull-down menus.
They reported that people tended to search primarily from the top to
the bottom of a menu. The initial eye fixation was usually to the menu
item that was in the first position, and almost always to one of the first
three items.
They observed that when making selections from unfamiliar menus, it is
highly likely that users will see one of the initial items. It should
not be assumed that users ever will see some of the other items, particularly
on longer menus.
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In both familiar and unfamiliar menus, users tend to begin
with one of the top three menu items. They do this for quite different reasons.
In familiar menus, they are trying to anticipate the location of frequently
used items. In unfamiliar menus, they are simply using a top-to-bottom selection
strategy.
Taking these two observations into account, it leads to two recommendations
when designing websites
If speedy use is important, try to make frequently used pages as consistent
from page-to-page as possible. Consistency enables people to anticipate
the location of favored items.
Selecting items quickly can be done best with items that are toward the
top of the page, in a familiar tab location, in a familiar "left-margin"
position, etc. The further down a page, the fewer the reference points,
and the harder it will be for users to anticipate even the approximate
locations of items (i.e., a hyperlinks).
On pages that are fast loading and consistent, users may be able to make
their selections before the pages appear, and certainly long before a
page completely loads. |
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Past Issues
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