Menu Organization and User Expertise in Information Search Tasks

Abstract

A categorical menu structure based on experts' semantic memory organization was developed, and search efficiency using this menu organization, relative to search efficiency using alphabetic and random menu organizations, was evaluated for users with different levels of expertise. In Experiment 1 experts in psychology sorted 120 psychological terms and the data were submitted to a multidimensional scaling procedure to identify the clusters of terms used to develop the categorical menu organization. In Experiment 2 search efficiency with the three different menu organizations was evaluated for users with different levels of expertise in the subject domain on two different search tasks: (1) definition matching, wherein given a definition, it was necessary to find the correct term with its definition; and (2) term matching, wherein given a term, it was necessary to find the identical term with its definition. Performance on both search tasks improved directly with expertise in the subject area when the categorical menu organization was used, and experts completed the definition-matching task faster than novices with all three types of menu organization. However, performance on the term-matching task was not influenced by expertise when alphabetic and random menu organizations were used.

Get full access to this article

View all access options for this article.

References

Barnard, P. J. , Morton, J. , Long, J.B. , and Ottley, E.A. (1977). Planning menus for display: Some effects of their structure and content on user performance. In Displays for man-machine systems. IEE Conference Publication No. 150 (pp. 130–133). London: IEE.

Card, S. K. (1982). User perceptual mechanisms in the search of computer command menus. In Proceedings of Human Factors in Computer Systems (pp. 190–196). New York: Association for Computing Machinery.

Card, S. K. (1983). Visual search of computer command menus. In H. Bourma and D. Bouwhuis (Eds.), Attention and performance X (pp. 97–108). Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.

Drever, J. (1964). The Penguin dictionary of psychology (rev. ed.). Harmondsworth, England: Penguin.

Giroux, L. , and Belleau, R. (1986). What's on the menu? The influence of menu content on the selection process. Behaviour and Information Technology, 5, 169–172.

Government of Canada . (1981). The design of videotex tree indexes. Ottawa, Canada: Department of Communications, Behavioral Research Group.

Liebelt, L. S. , McDonald, J. E. , Stone, J. D. , and Karat, J. (1982). The effect of organization on learning menu access. In Proceedings of the Human Factors Society 26th Annual Meeting (pp. 546–550). Santa Monica, CA: Human Factors Society.

MacGregor, J. , Lee, E. , and Lam, N. (1986). Optimizing the structure of database menu indexes: A decision model of menu search. Human Factors, 28, 387–399.

McDonald, J. E. , Stone, J. D. , and Liebelt, L. S. (1983). Searching for items in menus: The effects of organization and type of target. In Proceedings of the Human Factors Society 27th Annual Meeting (pp. 834–837). Santa Monica, CA: Human Factors Society.

10.

McDonald, J. E. , Stone, J. D. , Liebelt, L. S. , and Karat, J. (1982). Evaluating a method for structuring the user-system interface. In Proceedings of the Human Factors Society 26th Annual Meeting (pp. 551–555). Santa Monica, CA: Human Factors Society.

11.

Miller, G. A. (1984). Dictionaries of the mind. In Proceedings of the 23rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (pp. 305–314). Menlo Park, CA: Association for Computational Linguistics.

12.

Raymond, D. R. (1984). Personal data structuring in videotex (Tech. Report CS-84–7). Waterloo, Canada: University of Waterloo, Department of Computer Science.

13.

Schiffman, S. S. , Reynolds, M. L. , and Young, F. W. (1981). Introduction to multidimensional scaling. New York: Academic Press.

14.

Schwartz, J. P. , and Norman, K. L. (1986). The importance of item distinctiveness on performance using a menu selection system. Behaviour and Information Technology, 5, 173–182.

15.

Tombaugh, J. W. , and McEwen, S. A. (1982). Comparison of two information retrieval methods on videotex: Tree-structure versus alphabetical directory. In Proceedings of Human Factors in Computer Systems (pp. 106–110). New York: Association for Computing Machinery.

16.

Tulving, E. (1972). Episodic and semantic memory. In E. Tulving and W. Donaldson (Eds.), Organization of memory (pp. 381–403). New York: Academic Press.

17.

Wickens, C. D. (1984). Engineering psychology and human performance. Columbus, OH: Merrill.

18.

Young, F. W. , Lewyckyj, R. , and Takane, Y. (1982). The ALSCAL procedure. In P. S. Reinhardt (Ed.), SAS SUGI supplemental library user's guide (pp. 1–16). Raleigh, NC: SAS Institute.