Computer-Aided Design of Menu Bar and Pull-Down Menus for Business Oriented Applications

Building a usable menu bar, related pull-down menus and submenus or cascaded menus remains an important design activity in the development of interactive applications, especially in the domain of business oriented ones. To provide some assistance to designers who are responsible for achieving this task, a two-phased design method for a menu bar and related pull-down menus is presented. Based on a entity-relationship model of the final application, a first phase automatically generates an initial menu tree; a second phase enables designers to interactively perform refinement operations on the initial tree to obtain a final menu tree. This tree can be finally exported to a graphical editor for free editing and adaptation. This method covers the selection and the positioning of menu items, a first proposal for mnemonics and accelerators that are intrinsically based of menu design guidelines.