Menu Selection and Form Fill-in
Introduction
When designers cannot create appropriate direct manipulation strategies,
menu selection and form fillin are attractive alternatives. While early
systems used full screen menus with numbered items, modern menus are usually
pull-downs, check boxes or radio buttons in dialog box lists, or embedded
menus on World Wide Web pages, all selectable by mouse clicks. When the
menu items are written with familiar terminology and organized in a convenient
structure and sequence, users can select an item easily.
Menus are effective because they offer the cues to elicit user recognition,
rather than forcing the user to recall the syntax of a command from memory.
Users indicate their choices with a pointing device or keystroke and get
feedback to indicate what they have done. Menu selection is especially effective
when users have little training, use the system intermittently, are unfamiliar
with the terminology, and need help in structuring their decision-making
process. With careful design and high-speed interaction, menu selection
can become appealing even to expert frequent users.
However, just because a designer uses menu selection, form fillin, and dialog
boxes, there is no guarantee that the interface will be appealing and easy
to use. Effective interfaces emerge only after careful consideration of
and testing for numerous design issues, such as task-related organization,
phrasing of items, sequence of items, graphic layout and design, response
time, shortcuts for knowledgeable frequent users, on-line help, error correction,
and selection mechanisms (keyboard, pointing devices, touchscreen, voice,
etc.) (Norman, 1991).
This chapter starts with menus and then moves on to cover form fillin issues.
The examples are drawn from pull-down menus, full screen displays, embedded
menus of the World Wide Web, and graphical dialog boxes. Menu items can
be textual, iconic, or auditory.
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Last Updated:
11 December 2002
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