Today (May 15, 2018) is the 30 year anniversary of CHI’88 (May 15-19, 1988), where Jack Callahan, Ben Shneiderman, Mark Weiser and I (Don Hopkins) presented our paper “An Empirical Comparison of Pie vs. Linear Menus”. We found pie menus to be about 15% faster and with a significantly lower error rate than linear menus!
This article will discuss the history of what’s happened with pie menus over the last 30 years (and more), present both good and bad examples, including ideas half baked, experiments performed, problems discovered, solutions attempted, alternatives explored, progress made, software freed, products shipped, as well as setbacks and impediments to their widespread adoption.
Fantastic read with fantastic examples. Set some time aside for this one – you won’t regret it.
I don’t really consider the pie “menu” a menu.
It’s actually a precursor to gestures. If you know ahead of time what the menu options are, and if they are consistent, then you you don’t need to have a menu. You can have invisible menus, like gestures. Slide up, the equivalent of right click then slide up. But with a certain consistency, it’s what I’ve been using with zeam launcher since for ever, it’s also what makes the BlackBerry keyboard possible. Slide up to select a word, down to change symbols, right to backspace and nothing to the right? What is interesting is how the pie menu has evolved into gestures.overall if we could get a consistent back button action, life would be better. Can’t wait until apple implements the back. You know they want to, that one inconsistency they can’t ever fix unless they add more functions.
Well, Opera’s gestures were always consistent in that regard, and the “back” shortcut was just a “flip” on the left with the right button.
I’ve always been intrigued by pie menus, but haven’t had a chance to play around with them in code. But the author has coded many interesting examples (with variations) for experimentation.
I was wasn’t aware of Gnome-Pie. I installed it yesterday, and I like it. I’m going to ease into it – I’m starting with just the Media Controls part, and I will add other parts as I go along.
I still don’t have the time to play around with the code, but at least I can get a sense of it in practice. So far, so good!
Fascinating article. I found the “Coral” and “Trace” menu concepts particularly interesting.
Personally, I’m very skeptical of the practicality of non-linear (pie/radial) menus. The reason linear (vertical/horizontal) menus are so intuitive is because they’re easy to scan with your eyes, are flexible enough to accommodate a large number of items within the same paradigm, and allow frequent modifications with minimal disruption. For these reasons, I doubt pie menus will ever catch on, though gestures (an evolution of the same concept) have certainly found it’s place in our modern UI paradigm.