Pie-Menus in Mozilla

pronik writes "The Optimoz project on MozDev had two main development branches. While the first one, Mouse Gestures have been a success, we had to wait for the second, also very promising one: PieMenus. Now the wait is over! First implementation of PieMenus for Mozilla - RadialContext - is available for installation and testing!!!"

Comments

Best implementation of pie menus

[iocat]

I've seen was in Return to Zork back in 1994. Super cool. Anyone else have any good examples of pie menus? We're considering using them in a game and seeing more would be neat.

wow

[SlugLord]

These pie menus are really irritating... I guess it could be useful and would reduce the distance the mouse would have to travel, but I can't imagine why anyone would actually use these.

That being said, yay for Mozilla. A browser that actually runs without a 50 MB footprint and supports actual standards. That and you can get all kinds of silly do-dads on them like pie menus. (Yeah, I just glanced at pie menus briefly so maybe I've missed some really useful part of pie menus.

On the other hand, mouse gestures could be really useful, assuming you didn't accidentally use them when you didn't want to.

Re:that useful?

[mad_cow]

There's apparently been a bunch of research into their use and if I recall correctly, one of their biggest benefits is that they simplify complex menu navigation. Or something like that, anyways.

They've already found use in other places... the Sims and Neverwinter Nights are the two that come to mind.

Great!!!

[friedmud]

After surfing with this for just the past 10 minutes I can already tell that it is a feature that I will not be able to surf without ever again.

It is EMENSELY powerful when you combine it with tabs. Using it to close tabs and surf back and forth through tabs is a breeze and really saves on the mouse wrist gemnastics.

This is a great tool! Thanks mozilla!

Derek

Pie menu advantages

[uhlume]

As I understand it, the primary advantage of pie menus over standard linear/cascading menus is that they leverage muscle memory for enhanced speed and accuracy in menu selections. In essence, pie menus are not unlike a gestural control scheme with training wheels -- a series of selections from a cascading pie menu effectively forms a complete mouse-gesture, which can later be replicated without conscious reference to menu labels. This allows novice users to make selections cognitively by following menu selections, while more advanced users can simply remember the series of mouse movements required to reach a given selection.

More info here.

Re:Pie menu advantages

[Ian Bicking]

Maybe you have better muscle memory than me, but I absolutely have no ability to automatically hit menu entries. If you think you can, then try it out: try to select "reload" from the context menu with your eyes shut. And without practicing -- you can remember any one distance by practicing, maybe any two, but menus are typically longer than two entries.

If you can't do it with your eyes shut, it isn't muscle memory. I have fantastic keyboard muscle memory, but even then it's clearly not distance memory. On a keyboard, I remember the hand positions -- because the base of my hand doesn't move as I touchtype, each key makes my finger curl to a different degree. When hitting keys that require me to move my hands -- function keys, for instance -- I have a great difficulty doing it without looking. After repetition, I can remember a small number of distances -- to the backspace key, for instance -- but it is very limited and requires constant reinforcement.

This all is true of mouse movements as well -- muscle memory for distance just sucks. How often do you make a mistake that you move your mouse in the wrong direction? The only time I've had that problem is with the iMac mice that were easy to hold sideways. How often do you move the mouse the wrong distance? I do that many times each day -- I went to edit this last sentence, and moved my mouse about two pixels below the text box, requiring a correction. Hell, I probably make those mistakes on at least 10% of my mousing -- though I suspect it's closer to 80%, when you consider that almost all mousing involves a large movement to the general area (which is inaccurate), and then a series of smaller corrections until you are within the target area.

Re:RTFFAQ

[benwb]

Given the reasons given in the faq there's no reason why slashdot couldn't link to google...

It's all about the usability...

[altgrr]

As much as I hate to say it, the studies by Nielsen et al are actually worth something here. A context menu arranged in a circle will be easier to navigate, because you memorise direction as well as distance (look at the answer to q7 on the page).

Also, pie menus will be advantageous because, unlike keyboard shortcuts, they will be displayed whenever called upon. Further, arrangements such as piemenu-Left to go back, piemenu-Right to go forward, are intuitive.

Overall, this is a development in UI design that I'd like to see used more. I first saw it used in the extra software supplied with a Genius wheel mouse.

Re:It's all about the usability...

[Anonymous Coward]

Huh ? left for back and right for forward is intuitive ? For western people maybe...

Intuition comes from experience or common knowledge (which is learned actually) : something is intuitive because it looks like something else one has already experienced, or one is used to. Like reading from left to right make you think that right intuitively means forward.

Ok, I'm just quibbling...:)

NWN!

[Jade E. 2]

That site fails to list what is probably the second most well known use of 'pie' menus, after the Sims. Neverwinter Nights! The context menus you use to do basically everything are radial.

That brings up another good point, which is that from what I've seen none of the radial menu implementations (Moz's or his javascript ones) implement hotkeys, which for a lot of users (read: me) immensely improves speed. I didn't like NWN's radial menus at all, especially since they have a 9th zone in the middle, which is the 'close menu' or 'go back' function. That meant that you had to move the mouse a significant ways towards each icon, eliminating a lot of the speed gain. Then I found out that the keys on the Number Pad were hotkeys for each of the 8 directions (with 5 being a hotkey for the center zone, and 0 being a hotkey to popup the radial for your character.) After that I loved them. Need your familiar? 0-4-1. Need rapid shot mode? 0-3-7-3. That saved all my quickslots for spells, potions, and other life-saving bits. I played most of that game with my right hand on the mouse and my left moving between asdf and the number pad.

Of course, I have no idea whether I'll ever find a 'real' use for being able to 10-key with the wrong hand, but you never know. :)

Fasteroids: take the pie menu challenge!

[SimHacker]

wadetemp said: "It's my personal belief that pie menus are more of a perceived advantage rather than a true advantage. The complexity of motion makes you feel more industrious... although you may not be getting work done any faster at all."

What objective facts are your personal beliefs based on, or are they purely subjective? Question: How do you know that your personal beliefs are not merely a perception of knowledge than true knowledge? Answer: subject your theories to experimentation.

Have you performed any emperical experiments to determine if pie menus have an advantage over linear menus?

I'm sorry your personal belief contradicts my own emperical experience. In all the experiments I have ever done, and all the ones other people have done that I have read about, pie menus have been proven to be faster than linear menus.

Here are a few references to experiments measuring the usability of pie menus.

So it's not at all subjective or based on personal belief. The effect of Fitts' Law is quite easily measured, which should eliminate the need for resorting to the exposition of subjective personal beliefs.

Here is one such experiment that you can try for yourself (which requires Internet Explorer). Fasteroids is a free game that lets you compare pie menus with linear menus. Take the pie menu challange! Fasteroids tracks your selection speed and error rate, so you can compare pie menus and linear menus for yourself.

-Don

More pie meun demo movies

[SimHacker]

Here is another url to download the quicktime movie itself in case the streaming quicktime movie doesn't work through your firewall or nat gateway.

Streaming: Pie Menu Tab Window Demo.
Download: Pie Menu Tab Window Demo.

Here are some earlier demos of tab windows and pie menus in UniPress Emacs and HyperTIES at the University of Maryland HCIL.

Streaming: NeMACS (NeWS Emacs) Demo
Download: NeMACS (NeWS Emacs) Demo

This is a HyperTIES demo, showing embeded graphical links with pop-up images.

Streaming: HyperTIES Demo
Download: HyperTIES Demo

Here's just the pie menus from "All The Widgets", CHI'90 Special Isssue #57 ACM SIGGRAPH Video Review. Tape produced and narrated by Brad Meyers.

Streaming: Just The Pie Menus from All The Widgets
Download: Just The Pie Menus from All The Widgets

-Don

As opposed to mouse gestures...

[MrZeebo]

I've been using mouse gestures for quite some time, and love them. I was wondering how this would compare to them. At first, I was afraid it would slow me down, adding menus to my mouse gestures.

After just a few minutes of experimentation, the thing I like most about these pie menus is that the two mouse gestures I used most (Back and Forward) still work! I just right-click and move left or right, and can ignore the menu. At the same time, these pie menus add menus, which allow me to see what other options I have available without looking at the config or documentation, like I have to do with mouse gestures for gestures that I have yet to memorize.

Great work. One thing I love about the Mozilla is the truly "innovative" atmosphere where people aren't afraid to try new things. Bravo.

Re:Uhh ok.

[siphoncolder]

4. I've been using the menu exclusively for months. It works wonderful once you've gotten used to it. But the menu seems to be extremely confusing on first try. I'm still working on that. Please sit down calmly and try it out for a minute. Don't give up after 20 seconds. It's worth it.

Sir, I would like to laud you on your efforts to bring pie-menus into reality. As I understand it, the main advantage in using pie-menus has nothing to do with extra functionality or mouse-gesturing; it's simply the fact that if all your options are focused in a wheel around the cursor, it takes the same amount of time to click on each menu since they're all equally close to the cursor; this in turn increases usability & efficiency.

However, in regards to your 4th point, I have to agree with you totally. Pie menus are nothing new; in fact, the idea for them has been around for AGES. Various leaders in GUI development (think: Apple & MS) with user-focus groups have tried out pie menus on people, with exactly that complaint - while VERY efficient, they're just too confusing at first, and likely to frustrate new users. Most general users DO tend to give up within 20 seconds; others will just get frustrated & resist the change. People generally read in lines; it takes longer for the brain to process text that appears in non-standard forms.

I hope we all really enjoy these new pie-menus, but I wouldn't expect them to break out into the mainstream.