Xref: utzoo sci.psychology:2053 comp.cog-eng:1171 Path: utzoo!attcan!utgpu!utstat!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!rutgers!sun-barr!cs.utexas.edu!uunet!mcvax!ukc!stl!dsr From: dsr@stl.stc.co.uk (David Riches) Newsgroups: sci.psychology,comp.cog-eng Subject: Re: navigating through menus with colour Keywords: colour, menus Message-ID: <1498@stl.stc.co.uk> Date: 8 Jun 89 09:07:20 GMT References: <572@hfserver.hfnet.bt.co.uk> Sender: news@stl.stc.co.uk Reply-To: "David Riches" Organization: STC Technology Limited, London Road, Harlow, Essex, UK Lines: 32 >One problem with menu-driven interfaces is that they encourage users to >be lazy: if you ask them to recall the options on a pull-down menu, >performance is very poor. Options are recalled by their approximate >spatial position in the menu. A prediction from this would be that >colour-coding menu items would improve search times. Has there been any >work produced on navigating through menus using colour as a cue? > This isn't a problem. What this means is that the user interface is not getting in the way of the user. There are a number of experiments which have recently been performed in this area of menus. Not to do with colour I hasten to add but a couple with adaptive menus :- Trevellyan and Browne, "Self-Regulating Adatpive Systems", ACM SIGCHI Proceedings 1987. and also some work by Terry Mayes, Scottish HCI Centre, Strathclyde University, Glasgow, U.K. This has been looking at the Macintosh interface to see whether "expert users" can't remember what's in a menu but can when they're just about to use it and other things ... (This is for the BT man :- Go and ask Peter Boucherat about the AID project which addressed some issues on menus) Dave Riches PSS: dsr@stl.stc.co.uk ARPA: dsr%stl.stc.co.uk@earn-relay.ac.uk Smail: Software Design Centre, STC Technology Ltd., London Road, Harlow, Essex. CM17 9NA. England Phone: +44 (0)279-29531 x2496