A genetic algorithm for optimizing hierarchical menus

Hierarchical menus are widely used as a standard user interface in modern applications that use GUIs. The performance of the menu depends on many factors: structure, layout, colors and so on. There has been extensive research on novel menus, but there has been little work on improving performance by optimizing the menupsilas structure. This paper proposes algorithms based on the genetic algorithm (GA) and the simulated annealing (SA) for optimizing the performance of menus. The algorithms aim to minimize the average selection time of menu items by considering the userpsilas pointer movement and search/decision time. We will show the results on a static hierarchical menu of a cellular phone as an example where a small screen and limited input device are assumed. We will also show performance comparison of GA-based algorithm and the SA-based one by using wide variety of the usage patterns.