Improving cascading menu selections with adaptive activation areas.

Cascading menus are the most commonly used hierarchical menus in graphical user interfaces (GUIs). These menus, however, tend to have elongated paths with corner steering, which can result in navigation difficulties. To resolve the corner steering problem, most current cascading menus implement an explicit time delay between the cursor entering or leaving a parent menu item and posting/unposting the associated menu. In this paper, we present adaptive activation-area menus (AAMUs), a technique to improve cascading menu performance by providing a localized triangular activation area between the menu and the child submenu. This triangular activation area aims to overcome the corner steering problem by permitting quick diagonal navigation without imposing a time delay.