It is a challenging task to remember the location of a target item when the menu organization is different from the user's mental model. To mitigate, previous works opt to adjust the menu organization to the user's mental model. However, user's mental model are often difficult to be represented in menu organization. In this thesis, the problem is viewed in the opposite direction: the user should adjust their mental model to fit menu organization. Especially this thesis investigates the effects of the menu presentation on the rectification of user's mental models.
This experiment was performed on web site menus. On web sites, there are two forms of menu representation. Some show only the uppermost level menu items. When the user selects an item in the top menu, its lower level items appear. Others show all the lower level items on a screen.
The results show that the menu display showing only the uppermost level is more effective in users' learning of the menu organization. This finding could be useful in designing the menus of web or software systems where the user intensively use many functions and should learn their classification for good task performance.
