(IJACSA) International Journal of Advanced Computer Science and Applications, Vol. 7, No. 4, 2016 355 | Page www.ijacsa.thesai.org User Interface Menu Design Performance and User Preferences: A Review and Ways Forward Dr Pietro Murano Department of Computer Science, The Universal Design of ICT Research Group Oslo and Akershus University College of Applied Sciences, Oslo, Norway Margrete Sander Department of Computer Science, The Universal Design of ICT Research Group Oslo and Akershus University College of Applied Sciences, Oslo, Norway Abstract—This review paper is about menus on web pages and applications and their positioning on the user screen. The paper aims to provide the reader with a succinct summary of the major research in this area along with an easy to read tabulation of the most important studies. Furthermore, the paper concludes with some suggestions for future research regarding how menus and their positioning on the screen could be improved. The two principal suggestions concern trying to use more qualitative methods for investigating the issues and to develop in the future more universally designed menus. Keywords—Menus; navigation of interfaces; universal design; research methods I. INTRODUCTION The research and practical problem of how to design navigation methods or menus for web sites and applications has been around for some time. Many have opinions regarding which type of menu is best for users and this is reflected in the web sites we can see on the internet. However, most web sites seem to employ either a left or right vertically positioned menu or a horizontal top positioned menu, with some web sites sometimes opting for a combination of two or more styles of menu (e.g. see [1]). Many web sites also use the bottom horizontal part of a screen to position a form of menu (e.g. see [2]). Some are also more unique, by placing a horizontal menu in the middle of the screen (e.g. see [3]). Despite the opinions and numerous studies around this subject, there are still unanswered questions regarding which menu position or design might be optimal in terms of performance and user preference. Therefore, this paper is a review paper of the most relevant research conducted around evaluating menu types and their positioning on the screen. It is hoped that other researchers can benefit from this work, because it helps to bring together in one place a number of sources from diverse authors and publications that can be difficult to find in general searches. In addition, this review will focus on looking into the main issues of this field and to find any unexplored aspects in the field. The authors will also recommend some potential ways forward. This review paper should be of benefit to researchers working in this area, students of computer science and any professional designer or developer involved in menu design and implementation. Furthermore, the authors acknowledge that there are in existence certain types of menus that are less conventional and less used in every day applications and web sites, e.g. radial and flower menus. Please see Rubio and Janecek [4], Samp and Decker [5], Bailly, Lecolinet and Nigay [6] and Murano and Khan [7] for some examples. Discussions of these will be deliberately not included in this review paper, as the authors wish to focus on menus which are more commonly used and hopefully can contribute some ways forward to the existing patterns of menu use. Clearly, if radial and flower menus should become more main stream, then a future review should deal with this category of menu too. In section II, this paper will proceed by presenting the authors’ salient selection of relevant papers. This will be followed by a summary table of the most important papers covered so as to allow a more ‘at a glance’ option for quick reference. In section III, some ways forward are proposed for further investigation into this subject. Lastly, in section IV, the overall conclusions are presented. II. REVIEW OF THE MOST RELEVANT WORKS There have been studies investigating all manner of aspects to do with navigation or presentation of information. Pittsley and Memmott [8] investigated issues of users not noticing certain navigation cues on web pages designed for information retrieval in a US university library web site for research purposes. They tested some changes to the user interface. The redesign used in the evaluation involved a tabbed horizontal menu and left vertical context menu with larger font (both with the same labels) and a larger tabbed horizontal menu only. They also had a ‘Comparison group’ which was not fully described in the paper. They collected monthly usage on each information guide, page and secondary pages as a guide to show if the redesigns had been successful. Their basic findings were that both prototype ‘menus’ showed an increase in secondary page hits compared to the ‘comparison group’. In another study by Melguizo, Vidya and van Oostendorp [9], menu types, the complexity of a navigation path and the users’ spatial skills in relation to finding web information were investigated. They also looked at ‘web disorientation’. There were two types of menu studied, left vertical expandable and left vertical sequential. They measured task