Authors

Shengdong Zhao, Ravin Balakrishnan

Paper

Presentation

Video

The performance benefit of Compound-stroke Marking Menu can be seen in the following video; however, multi-stroke marking menu allows for significantly more accurate and faster menu selections overall, but most importantly also in menus with a large number of items where performance of the compound mark technique is particularly poor.

Abstract

We present a variant of hierarchical marking menus where items are selected using a series of inflection-free simple marks, rather than the single “zig-zag” compound mark used in the traditional design. Theoretical analysis indicates that this simple mark approach has the potential to significantly increase the number of items in a marking menu that can be selected efficiently and accurately. A user experiment is presented that compares the simple and compound mark techniques. Results show that the simple mark technique allows for significantly more accurate and faster menu selections overall, but most importantly also in menus with a large number of items where performance of the compound mark technique is particularly poor. The simple mark technique also requires significantly less physical input space to perform the selections, making it particularly suitable for small footprint pen-based input devices. Visual design alternatives are also discussed.

Keywords: Marking menus, pie menus, simple mark