Context and selective retreat in hierarchical menu structures

Abstract This paper describes an experiment to compare the use of two different forms of menu dialogue to solve a relatively complex problem. The problem involves multiple queries from a videotex database accessed by a potentially deep hierarchical set of menus. The dialogue forms compared are a standard videotex menu system and an enhanced menu system. The latter provides both additional contextual information and a means of selective, rather than incremental, retreat. Although no significant time advantage was measured, the results do demonstrate a significant improvement in navigation for the enhanced menu system and show the value of using realistic problems for this type of evaluation.