The Effect of Organization on Learning Menu Access
- 1 October 1982
- journal article
- Published by SAGE Publications in Proceedings of the Human Factors Society Annual Meeting
- Vol. 26 (6) , 546-550
- https://doi.org/10.1177/154193128202600613
Abstract
This study examines whether different ways of organizing items in a menu produce differences in the menu's learnability. A paired associate learning paradigm was employed in which subjects were required to learn to associate a three-letter response with each target item (an exemplar of a natural category). Responses were structured hierarchically such that terminal clusters of items shared the first two letters of their responses. Two methods of structuring the items were compared: Organized and Random. In the Organized menus, the items in a terminal cluster were all members of the same natural category. In the Random menus, items were assigned to terminal clusters such that no two category exemplars appeared in the same cluster. The meaningfulness of the choice points in the Organized menus yielded faster and more accurate performance than was observed on the Random menus. Implications for the structuring of menu systems are discussed.This publication has 4 references indexed in Scilit:
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