The effects of positional constancy on searching menus for information

One of the more popular methods today for instructing software designers on how to structure man-display interfaces is with guidelines. Numerous design guidelines have been promulgated in the last several years (Engel and Granda, 1975; Ramsey and Atwood, 1980; Smith, 1980; Kennedy, 1974; Pew and Rollins, 1975) and there is still much current activity in collecting and expanding screen guidelines (Smith, 1981; Smith & Aucella, 1982) In the past few years an increased number of empirical investigations quantifying directly the behavioral impacts of individual design guidelines have appeared in the literature. Issues such as the depth of menu hierarchies (Miller, 1981), eye movements during menu viewing (Card, 1982; Kolers, Duchnicky, and Ferguson, 1981), or location of screen entry areas (Granda, Teitelbaum, and Dunlap, 1982) have been experimentally studied.