Research Problem

Cascading menus are generally not very easy to use and previous researchers have spent great efforst improving them. More recently another type of menus we term as "panel menus" (which display all items on a panel) have been used in major sites such as Amazon and Microsoft. Therefore it would be of great interest to find out which type of menus perform better and which type of menus are more preferred by users.

Solution - Procedure

Reviewed the literature about computer menus designs -- particularly cascading menus; but found little literature on panel menus. Designed two laboratory experiments to compare cascading and panel menus Conducted Experiment 1: N=20, unrealistic menu items, mixed design Conducted Experiment 2: N=33, more realistic menu items, within-subjects design. Analyzed the data and found that panel menus performed faster than cascading menus and that panel menus were preferred to cascading menus when more realistic menu items were used

Skills Involved

1. Lab experiment design
2. Menu system programming (HTML/DHTML and Javascript)
3. Data analysis (SAS and SPSS)