The depth/breadth trade-off in the design of menu-driven user interfaces
International Journal of Man-Machine Studies
Selection from alphabetic and numeric menu trees using a touch screen: breadth, depth, and width
CHI '85 Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
Designing a menu-based interface to an operating system
CHI '85 Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
User perceptual mechanisms in the search of computer command menus
CHI '82 Proceedings of the 1982 Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
Genetic algorithm can optimize hierarchical menus
Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
Optimizing hierarchical menus by genetic algorithm and simulated annealing
Proceedings of the 10th annual conference on Genetic and evolutionary computation
Performance evaluation of a genetic algorithm for optimizing hierarchical menus
CEC'09 Proceedings of the Eleventh conference on Congress on Evolutionary Computation
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The breadth/depth trade-off in menu structure refers to advantages and disadvantages of menu breadth (having fewer levels/pages of menu selections with more selections per level) and depth (having more levels/pages with fewer selections per level). Several studies (Snowberry, Parkinson & Sisson, 1983; Landauer & Nachbar, 1985) demonstrate enhanced user performance with increased breadth. However, other studies (Miller, 1981; Kiger, 1984; Tullis, 1985) fail to show an advantage in user performance with increased depth. Complicating the breadth/depth issue is the issue of the ordering of selections within each menu level. Snowberry et al. found superiority of breadth only with consistent ordering of selections within levels. Card (1982) reported that alphabetical ordering of selections is superior to functional ("logical") ordering, which in turn is superior to random ordering.