Optimal Menu Hierarchy Design: Syntax and Semantics

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Abstract
Increasingly users must navigate through a hierarchy of menus in order to access the various functions available on a computer. As the number of functions proliferates and the menu hierarchies grow more complex, the time it takes users to access any given function has become unacceptably slow. Specifically, given a set of functions, recent studies have shown how to identify the structure of the complete, homogeneous hierarchy that minimizes the average time to access these functions. In this article a general method for finding the optimal hierarchy is developed. The method does not confine the search for an optimal hierarchy to the set of complete, homogeneous hierarchies; nor, given suitable input, does the method select as optimal a hierarchy that cannot be easily navigated. It is important to identify the optimal hierarchy because it can reduce the average access time considerably, in some cases (at least in theory) by almost 100%.

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