One from Column A and one from Column B: Simultaneous vs. Sequential Menus

Authors:

Harry Hochheiser - hsh@cs.umd.edu
Natasha Kositsyna - natasha@cs.umd.edu
Geoffroy Ville - ville@isr.umd.edu

Abstract:

To date, experimental comparisons of various menu layouts have concentrated largely on variants of strictly hierarchical structures. Simultaneous menus - layouts which present multiple active menus on a screen at the same time - are an alternative arrangement that may be useful in many cases. This paper describes an experiment involving a between-subject comparison between simultaneous menus and their sequential counterparts. Twenty experienced web users used either simultaneous or sequential menus in a standard web browser to answer questions based on US Census data. For tasks involving no backtracking, sequential menus outperformed simultaneous, but the opposite result held for tasks involving multiple backtracking steps.