User Interface Research Group - Masatomo Kobayashi - D-menus

D-menus

What is this study about?

We proposes a direction-based technique for handling cascading menus. Our goal in this study is to improve the efficiency of menu traversal (with two-dimensional pointing devices). The proposed cascading menu can be seen as a gesture-based system; yet it is easy to use, even for users who are accustomed to traditional cascading menus. Moreover, our technique can be used with various pointing devices, such as mice, styluses, and fingers.

The behavior of our cascading menu is depending not only on the position of the mouse cursor, but also on the movement direction of the pointing device: horizontal motion opens/closes submenus, while vertical motion changes the highlight within the current menu. This feature would reduce cursor movement errors. In addition, submenus in our system pop up at the position where horizontal motion occurs. This is expected to reduce the length of the movement path for menu traversal, and keep menus from obscuring each other irregularly.

Materials

• Video
• Presentation Slides

Demo: Menu Bar

• D-menus Demo (Java Web Start)
• Download JAR (tomlib.jar is required to run this demo)

1. Move the mouse cursor on a menu up/down to change the highlight within the menu;
2. Move it to the right to open a submenu or select a menu item; and
3. Move it to the left to close the menu.
4. A mouse-click action also can open a submenu, select a menu item, or close several menus at once.

Publications

1. Kobayashi, M. and Igarashi, T. Considering the Direction of Cursor Movement for Efficient Traversal of Cascading Menus. In Proceedings of UIST '03, Vancouver, BC, November 2003, pp.91-94.
2. 小林正朋、五十嵐健夫「マウスカーソルの移動方向を考慮した階層メニュー展開法」インタラクション2003論文集、東京、2003年2月、pp.35-36。