Compass+Ring: A Multimodal Menu to Improve Interaction Performance and Comfortability in One-handed Scenarios

In numerous applications, an excellent interface design should allow users to perform secondary tasks as naturally as possible without affecting the main task. Multimodal handheld menus are regularly the preferred user interface that meets the natural switching of primary and secondary tasks. However, existing multimodal handheld menus have some limitations under single-handed conditions, or the comfort needs improvement. To address these issues, this paper proposes a novel multimodal handheld menu: Compass+Ring. The “compass” integrates gesture, gaze, and speech into a pie menu, whereas the “ring” serves as a shortcut menu. The Compass menu improves interaction performance and comfortability in one-handed scenarios, and the Ring menu alleviates eye fatigue when both hands are free. We evaluated five handheld menus: Touch, Gaze+Pinch, Speech+Pinch, Bangles, and Compass+Ring. We first analyze the usability of these menus in three different scenarios, and then conduct a user study about these menus in geometry matching and line drawing tasks. The results show that the Bangles menu and the Compass+Ring menu are more suitable for one-handed scenarios than the other three menus, and the Compass+Ring menu is superior to the Bangles menu in terms of efficiency and hand fatigue. In addition, participants indicate that the Ring menu can reduce eye strain for the Compass menu in two-handed scenarios and increase haptic perception.