Wave Menus: Improving the Novice Mode of Hierarchical Marking Menus

We present Wave menus, a variant of multi-stroke marking menus designed for improving the novice mode of marking while preserving their efficiency in the expert mode of marking. Focusing on the novice mode, a criteria-based analysis of existing marking menus motivates the design of Wave menus. Moreover a user experiment is presented that compares four hierarchical marking menus in novice mode. Results show that Wave and compound-stroke menus are significantly faster and more accurate than multi-stroke menus in novice mode, while it has been shown that in expert mode the multi-stroke menus and therefore the Wave menus outperform the compound-stroke menus. Wave menus also require significantly less screen space than compound-stroke menus. As a conclusion, Wave menus offer the best performance for both novice and expert modes in comparison with existing multi-level marking menus, while requiring less screen space than compound-stroke menus.