skip to main content
10.1145/57167.57182acmconferencesArticle/Chapter ViewAbstractPublication PageschiConference Proceedingsconference-collections
Article
Free Access

An empirical comparison of pie vs. linear menus

Published:01 May 1988Publication History

ABSTRACT

Menus are largely formatted in a linear fashion listing items from the top to bottom of the screen or window. Pull down menus are a common example of this format. Bitmapped computer displays, however, allow greater freedom in the placement, font, and general presentation of menus. A pie menu is a format where the items are placed along the circumference of a circle at equal radial distances from the center. Pie menus gain over traditional linear menus by reducing target seek time, lowering error rates by fixing the distance factor and increasing the target size in Fitts's Law, minimizing the drift distance after target selection, and are, in general, subjectively equivalent to the linear style.

References

  1. 1.Adobe Systems Inc. Postscript Reference .Manual, Palo Alto, Calif., 1985.Google ScholarGoogle Scholar
  2. 2.Card, S.K. User perceptual mechanisms: in the search of computer command menus, In Proceedings . Human Factors in Compuler Systems 1982 (Gaithersburg, Md., Mar. 15-17). ACM, New York, 1982, pp. 190-196. Google ScholarGoogle ScholarDigital LibraryDigital Library
  3. 3.Card, S.K., Moran, T.P., and Newell, A. The Psychology of Human-Computer {nleraction, Lawrence Erlbaum, London, 1983. Google ScholarGoogle ScholarDigital LibraryDigital Library
  4. 4.Dray, S.M., Ogden, W.G., and Vestewig, R.E. man computer interface Proceedings of the Human Factors Society: 25th Annual Meeting 1981 (Rochester, N.Y., Oct. 12-16). Human Factors Society, Santa Monica, Calif., 1981, pp. 746-748.Google ScholarGoogle Scholar
  5. 5.Ge~tys, J. and Newman, R., X Windows. MIT, 1985.Google ScholarGoogle Scholar
  6. 6.Gosling, J. Ne WS: A Definitive Approach to Window Systems Sun Microsystems Corp., Mountain View, Calif., 1986.Google ScholarGoogle Scholar
  7. 7.Hopkins, D., Callahan, J., and Weiser, M. Pies: Implementation, Evaluation and Application of Circular Menus. University of Maryland Computer Science Department Technical Report, 1988.Google ScholarGoogle Scholar
  8. 8.Kirk, R. t'Txperimen~al Design: Procedures for the Behavioral Sciences. Brooks-Cole, Belmont, Calif., 1968.Google ScholarGoogle Scholar
  9. 9.McDonald, J.E., Stone, J.D., and Liebelt, L.S. Searching fi)r items in menus: The effects of organization and type of target. Proceeding of the Human Factors Society: ~7th Annual Meeting 1983 (Norfolk, Virginia, Oct. 10-14). Human Factors Society, Santa Monica, Calif., 1983, pp. 834-837.Google ScholarGoogle Scholar
  10. 10.Perlman, G. Making the right choices with menus. INTERACT '84, First IFIP International Conference on Human Computer interaction. NorthtIolland, Amsterdam, 1984, pp. 291-295.Google ScholarGoogle Scholar
  11. 11.Shneiderman, B. Designing ~he User Interface, Addison-Wesley, Reading, Mass., 1987. Google ScholarGoogle ScholarDigital LibraryDigital Library
  12. 12.Xerox Corporation, Interpress Electronic Printing Standard. Stamford, Conn., 1984.Google ScholarGoogle Scholar

Index Terms

  1. An empirical comparison of pie vs. linear menus

      Recommendations

      Comments

      Login options

      Check if you have access through your login credentials or your institution to get full access on this article.

      Sign in
      • Published in

        cover image ACM Conferences
        CHI '88: Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
        May 1988
        292 pages
        ISBN:0201142376
        DOI:10.1145/57167

        Copyright © 1988 ACM

        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]

        Publisher

        Association for Computing Machinery

        New York, NY, United States

        Publication History

        • Published: 1 May 1988

        Permissions

        Request permissions about this article.

        Request Permissions

        Check for updates

        Qualifiers

        • Article

        Acceptance Rates

        CHI '88 Paper Acceptance Rate39of187submissions,21%Overall Acceptance Rate6,199of26,314submissions,24%

      PDF Format

      View or Download as a PDF file.

      PDF

      eReader

      View online with eReader.

      eReader