An empirical comparison of pie vs. linear menus
CHI '88 Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
Toolglass and magic lenses: the see-through interface
SIGGRAPH '93 Proceedings of the 20th annual conference on Computer graphics and interactive techniques
Split menus: effectively using selection frequency to organize menus
ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction (TOCHI)
Supporting command reuse: empirical foundations and principles
International Journal of Man-Machine Studies
International Journal of Man-Machine Studies
User learning and performance with marking menus
CHI '94 Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
An experimental evaluation of transparent menu usage
Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
The essential guide to user interface design: an introduction to GUI design principles and techniques
101 spots, or how do users read menus?
Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
The Hotbox: efficient access to a large number of menu-items
Proceedings of the SIGCHI conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
Navigation strategies with ecological displays
International Journal of Human-Computer Studies
UIST '00 Proceedings of the 13th annual ACM symposium on User interface software and technology
Interface design and multivariate analysis of UNIX command use
ACM Transactions on Information Systems (TOIS)
Visual search and mouse-pointing in labeled versus unlabeled two-dimensional visual hierarchies
ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction (TOCHI)
A comparison of static, adaptive, and adaptable menus
Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
Unintended effects: varying icon spacing changes users' visual search strategy
Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
Feature congestion: a measure of display clutter
Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
Faster document navigation with space-filling thumbnails
Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
Improving list revisitation with ListMaps
Proceedings of the working conference on Advanced visual interfaces
Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
Promoting Hotkey use through rehearsal with ExposeHK
Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
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Menus and toolbars are the primary controls for issuing commands in modern interfaces. As software systems continue to support increasingly large command sets, the user's task of locating the desired command control is progressively time consuming. Many factors influence a user's ability to visually search for and select a target in a set of menus or toolbars, one of which is the degree of parallelism in the display arrangement. A fully parallel layout will show all commands at once, allowing the user to visually scan all items without needing to manipulate the interface, but there is a risk that this will harm performance due to excessive visual clutter. At the other extreme, a fully serial display minimises visual clutter by displaying only one item at a time, but separate interface manipulations are necessary to display each item. This paper examines the effects of increasing the number of items displayed to users in menus through parallelism---displaying multiple menus simultaneously, spanning both horizontally and vertically---and compares it to traditional menus and pure serial display menus. We found that moving from serial to a partially parallel (traditional) menu significantly improved user performance, but moving from a partially parallel to a fully parallel menu design had more ambiguous results. The results have direct design implications for the layout of command interfaces.