Abstract : While it is well known that menu usage follows a Zipfian distribution, there has been little interest in the impact of menu item frequency distribution on user's behavior. In this note, we explore the effects of frequency distribution on average menu performance as well as individual item performance. We compare three frequency distributions of menu item usage: Uniform; Zipfian with s=1 and Zipfian with s=2. The results show that (1) user's behavior is sensitive to different frequency distributions at both menu and item level; (2) individual item selection time depends on, not only its frequency, but also the frequency of other items in the menu. Finally, we discuss how these findings might have impacts on menu design, empirical studies and menu modelling.
Wanyu Liu, Gilles Bailly, Andrew Howes. Effects of Frequency Distribution on Linear Menu Performance. Proceedings of the 2017 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI '17), May 2017, Denver, United States. pp.1307-1312, ⟨10.1145/3025453.3025707⟩. ⟨hal-01593550⟩
