| We performed a controlled empirical comparison of pie vs linear menus in 1988, which we presented at CHI'88 and published in the proceedings. It showed that pie menus were 15% faster than linear menus, and that they had a significantly lower error rate. An Empirical Comparison of Pie vs. Linear Menus. Presented at ACM CHI’88 Conference, Washington DC, 1988. https://donhopkins.medium.com/an-empirical-comparison-of-pie... [...] Conclusions What does this mean? Should we program pie menus into our bitmapped window systems tomorrow and expect a 15–20% increase in productivity since users can select items slightly faster with pie menus. Pie menus seem promising, but more experiments are needed before issuing a strong recommendation. First, this experiment only addresses fixed length menus, in particular, menus consisting of 8 items — no more, no less. Secondly, there remains the problem of increased screen real estate usage, In one trial a subject complained because the pie menu obscured his view of the target prompt message. Finally, the questionnaire showed that the subjects were almost evenly divided between pie and linear menus in subjective satisfaction. Many found it difficult to “home in on” a particular item because of the unusual activation region characteristics of the pie menu. One assumption of this study concerns the use of a mouse/cursor control device and the use of pop-up style menus (as opposed to menus invoked from a fixed screen location or permanent menus). Certainly, pie menus can and in fact have been incorporated to use keyed input [7] and fixed “pull-down” style presentation (the pie menu becomes a semicircle menu). These variations are areas for further research. |
Task completion speed would be a better measurement, to capture the effect of the pie menu interfering with the main task by temporarily obscuring it from view.