Wing Expansion Menu - An approach for faster and more precise navigation with cascading pull-down menus

This paper presents a new design suggestion for cascading pull-down menus to make user interaction with it faster and therefore easier: The Wing Expansion Menu (WEM). The proposal is based on the Steering Law, which implies a wider steering path for menu items. Our Approach combines this enlargement with a heuristic function that provides a probability with which the user will select an menu item. The menu can also be adapted to a wide variety of situations using certain variables. A user study of a WEM against a standard pull-down menu showed an average improvement of 18.63% in user interaction speed. A second user study, which evaluated one of the significant innovations of the WEM compared to a similar approach, showed an average improvement of 7.01% in user interaction speed.