Foraging-based optimization of menu systems

•This paper presents a novel integer programming formulation for the hierarchical menus.•This paper introduces a novel objective function based on information foraging theory.•This technique yields usable, well-ordered command hierarchies from a single model.•This paper models the hierarchical menu design problem as a combination of the exact set covering problem and the assignment problem.•The performance of computationally designed menus was ∼25% faster to use than existing commercial designs.