Abstract
Hierarchical menus are widely used as a standard user interface in modern applications that use GUIs. The performance of the menu depends on many factors: structure, layout, colors and so on. There has been extensive research on novel menus, but there has been little work on improving performance by optimizing the menu's structure. This paper proposes an algorithm based on the genetic algorithm for optimizing the performance of menus. The algorithm aims to minimize the average selection time of menu items by considering the user's pointer movement and search/decision time. We will show the results on static hierarchical menus of a cellular phone and a PDA as examples where small screen and limited input device are assumed. We will show the effectiveness of the algorithm by using wide variety of usage patterns.
