UI Design Newsletter – July, 2000

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.

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.

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.