Fractal Adaptive Menus: Concept, Engineering, and Use Case

The literature is replete with studies that have explored, analyzed, and tested different techniques for ensuring the adaptivity of a menu in graphical user interfaces, mainly by maintaining the format of a menu bar, its pull-down menus, and its sub-menus, while varying its presentation. Instead of restricting adaptivity to this format, adaptivity could be ensured by exploiting the entire display space available in full-screen or intermediate-screen mode. Inspired by fractal geometry, we motivate and define the concept of a fractal adaptive menu, a graphical adaptive menu that benefits from three properties useful for adaptivity: self-similarity, recursive navigation, and hierarchical menu organization. We explain how to engineer this menu for graphical user interfaces and validate this approach with a case study in machine control for a steel mill. In addition to being adaptive to the screen resolution, a fractal adaptive menu is particularly beneficial when menu navigation is repetitive or frequent in a deep hierarchical organization. Proprioceptive memory can make it easier to remember which menu areas to select during a long crossing of the hierarchy.