A Method for Evaluating and Revising Hierarchical Menus

in the Case of Menu System for Destination Setting in a Car Navigation System

Abstract

This paper proposes a method for evaluating and revising a hierarchical menu system by using results from a series of usability evaluation experiments. The method consists of two stages. The first stage is to understand the context in which the menu system in question is actually used in real situations by means of intensive interviews. This makes clear the situations in which the user should have difficulty in accomplishing his/her tasks using the menu system. The second stage is to elucidate user's knowledge about the terms used in the menu system which we assume provides the basis for the user to decide which to select when performing the task. This is done by a large scale user test in which a user answers the degree of similarity between the terms used in the menu system and the description of the task he/she has to do by using the menu system. A method for revising the menu system by taking into account the user's knowledge is proposed. We finally show the validity of the proposed method by conducting a user experiment whose results show that the similarity measures are a good predictor for user's menu item selection.