Personalized Hierarchical Menu Organization for Mobile Device Users

Abstract

As Internet access via cell phone browsers becomes more common, new website interfaces are emerging. Hierarchical menus are effective for such interfaces due to their compact presentation. For menus with many levels and possible destinations, personalized menu organizations can potentially expedite navigation. This thesis contains an empirical and analytical evaluation of two menu personalization techniques based on user preferences, Expanded menus and Expanded⁄Reordered menus. A 30 participant experiment revealed that both types of personalized menus resulted in faster performance and higher evaluations from the users, with the Expanded⁄Reordered menu ranking the highest in both respects. One interesting finding was that individual users' evaluation was not consistent with their performance. Data collected from the performance study was used to evaluate an existing GOMS model of cell phone menu traversal, which demonstrated significant limitations in the generality of the model. However, the results also suggest that individual differences in user performance may account for much of the error in model predictions.