LINEUp: List Navigation Using Edge Menu

Abstract

Displaying and interacting with Cascaded Menus on mobile phones is challenging due to the limited screen real estate. In this paper, we propose the Edge Menu – U-shaped layout displayed along the edges of the screen. Through the use of transparency and minimum screen space, the Edge Menu can be overlaid on top of existing items on the screen. We evaluated the suitability of two versions of the Edge Menu: List and Nested Menus. We compared the performance of the Edge Menu to the traditional Linear Menu. We conducted three studies and revealed that Edge Menu can support the use of single hand and both hands, it outperforms the regular Linear Menu, and is in average 38.5% faster for Single hand usage, and 40% faster for Dual hands usage. Edge Menu using both hands is in average 7.4% faster than Edge Menu using Single hand. Finally, the Edge Menu in Nested Menus shown to be faster than Linear Menus in Nested Menus with 22%–36%.