Characterize the transition from menus to hotkeys

Abstract

This paper aims at better understanding the transition from menus to shortcuts. We first discuss the limitations and the opportunities of the theoretical and empirical characterizations of this transition. We then consider keyboard shortcuts as a case study and manually annotate empirical data to estimate several behavioral markers such as the initial switch, the transition duration or the performance dip. These markers serve to precisely characterize and compare three interaction techniques. Finally, we compare two methods to automatically characterize the transition from menus to shortcuts.