Measuring FlowMenu Performance

Abstract

This paper evaluates the performance characteristics of FlowMenu, a new type of pop-up menu mixing command and direct manipulation. FlowMenu was compared with marking menus on a simple selection task, and with tool palette selection on a task that combined selection with drawing. Our results compared with those in previous experiments indicate that FlowMenu offers as much of an advantag over tool palette selection as does Toolglass, a two-handed technique. At the same time, it is not significantly slower than marking menus. Additional results show that selection performance depends on distance around the menu, but not on initial position or direction. These results provide a guide for the design of high-performance menu configurations. Keywords: FlowMenu, marking menu, tool palette, Tool-glass, empirical studies (UMIACS-TR-2002-88) (HCIL-TR-2002-17)