Bubbling menus: A selective mechanism for accessing hierarchical drop-down menus

This paper introduces bubbling menus, a new design for cascading drop-down menus. Bubbling menus combine the bubble cursor [10] with directional mouse-gesture tech-niques to facilitate the access of certain items in a menu, such as frequently selected items. Through an extensive iterative design process, we explore bubbling menus in the context of adaptive and customizable user interfaces. Unlike other adaptation and customization techniques such as split menus, bubbling menus do not disrupt the original structure of menus and enable the activation of menus far from a menu bar. Results from two evaluation studies pre-sented in the paper show that bubbling menus provide an effective alternative to accelerate menu selections tasks. ACM Classification: H5.2 [Information interfaces an