Publication
The Hotbox: efficient access to a large number of menu-items
AbstractThe proliferation of multiple toolbars and UI widgets around the perimeter of application windows is an indication that the traditional GUI design of a single menubar is not sufficient to support large scale applications with numerous functions. In this paper we describe a new widget which is an enhancement of the traditional menubar which dramatically increases menu-item capacity. This widget, called the “Hotbox” combines several GUI techniques which are generally used independently: accelerator keys, modal dialogs, pop-up/pull down menus, radial menus, marking menus and menubars. These techniques are fitted together to create a single, easy to learn yet fast to operate GUI widget which can handle significantly more menu items than the traditional GUI menubar. We describe the design rationale of the Hotbox and its effectiveness in a large scale commercial application. While the Hotbox was developed for a particular application domain, the widget itself and the design rationale are potentially useful in other domains.
Download publicationRelated Resources
See what’s new.
2024
DesignQA: A Multimodal Benchmark for Evaluating Large Language Models’ Understanding of Engineering DocumentationNovel benchmark aimed at evaluating the proficiency of multimodal…
2015
Candid Interaction: Revealing Hidden Mobile and Wearable Computing ActivitiesThe growth of mobile and wearable technologies has made it often…
2011
Building Information Modeling and Heritage DocumentationDespite the widespread adoption of building information modeling (BIM)…
2013
Design-to-Fabricate: Maker Hardware Requires Maker SoftwareAs a result of the increasing availability of consumer-level 3D…
Get in touch
Something pique your interest? Get in touch if you’d like to learn more about Autodesk Research, our projects, people, and potential collaboration opportunities.
Contact us