Menus that learn

What I'd like to see is a menu system that learns the patterns of usage that it user carries out. Say, every time a menu item is selected (at any level), a count is incremented to indicate a "Hit".

As the statistics build up, the menus then re-arrange themselves with the most used first under the selection key.

Example: Say my most frequent menu choice at the top level is "Playlists", the second most frequent "Sound" and the third "Power Off". Playlists will appear as the default selection under the remote's * key, with Sound to the right and Power Off to the left. To select my most popular menu choice I then have to just hit Enter to step to the next menu level. To get my second popular, I press (right)(enter) and third it's (left)(enter). The most effort in terms of finger (thumb) movement is therefore the least popular choice of the three, the minimum affort the most popular.

After I've hit Sound, then at this menu level, the most popular choice is again directly under the (enter) key (for me at the moment, this would be Equaliser), so to step rapidly down the menu structure just becomes a sequence of minimum button selections.

At the moment, these two examples are pretty close to the actual, rigid menu structure. However, if dynamically configurable menus that re-configure themselves based on usage statistics were available, there would be a subtle improvement in the structure due to statistical tuning as the user uses the unit (it would also mean that everyone's directory structure could turn out different due to different usage patterns).

It's an interesting idea, but I think in practice it would drive me up the wall... =)
If you know it's "menu, right, right, select, select, select" to turn on Funnelweb (for example), then it's going to annoy you if it moves (Especially if you have a macro to do it via a serial port interface etc)
A better solution would be for the user to be able to configure the order, although the "Hit" statistics could be shown as a useful guide...

Jazz
(List 112, S/N 00030, 4 gig blue)

I agree - I don't like that idea - I was annoyed enough when the menu moved from 9 something to 10, as I had memorized the locations for everything... Now every time I go to select the radio I end up doing something else:)
-mark

...proud to have one of the first Mark I units

"Learning" menus would indeed be a pain, but it would be great if the user could simply configure the menu - throw all the stuff you rarely use into one submenu so you could have one nice lean, clean menu.

In reply to:

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throw all the stuff you rarely use into one submenu so you could have one nice lean, clean menu.

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In fact, why not just treat menus in the same way as one treats playlists - be able to move them about in Emplode. At the moment there's only one tab in the left hand pane ("Playlists"), add another for menus and you're there.

OK, I'm sure it's not as easy as that, but...

Nick.

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18Gb blue - s/n 080000299 (original queue position 8724)

We have a plan for a flexible UI system that goes much further than this. I believe it may be used by other projects that we're about to commence, and the chances of it getting onto the car player are very high.

It definitely won't be in 1.1, though, unless someone spikes Roger's tea with pep pills

Rob

My gut reaction to "menus that learn" and "rearrange themselves" was NO WAY FORGET IT because it would be counter intuitive. However, my office has switched over to Windows 2000 and the start menu is a "menu that learns" and eliminates items that are not frequently used into a ">>" (or "..." in other words). So frequently used items bubble up and infrequently used items are summarized away and this amazingly cleans up the menus incredibly! And it's not as unintuitive as I originally thought.

Later on, I noticed that some of the more prominent web sites have rudimentary order by use features and remove by disuse as well.

So I'd say, yeah, definitely implement a learning menus feature. Just make sure it can be disabled for the "power" users that click through the menus without looking.

Calvin

The biggest difficulty about "learning menus" like the ones in Office 2000 is the training aspect of it.

I work at a company which creates computer-based training for Windows apps, and you wouldn't believe how hard it is to work around that stuff. In the old days, we simply used to say "click on tools, then click on options." Now we have to qualify that with ten paragraphs of explanation about the learning menus.

And don't get me started on how difficult it is to simulate that behavior in a live training app...

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Tony Fabris