Investigating the Necessity of Delay in Marking Menu Invocation

Delayed display of menu items is a core design component of marking menus, arguably to prevent visual distraction and foster the use of mark mode. We investigate these assumptions, by contrasting the original marking menu design with immediately-displayed marking menus. In three controlled experiments, we fail to reveal obvious and systematic performance or usability advantages to using delay and mark mode. Only in very constrained settings – after significant training and only two items to learn – did traditional marking menus show a time improvement of about 260 ms. Otherwise, we found an overall decrease in performance with delay, whether participants exhibited practiced or unpracticed behaviour. Our final study failed to demonstrate that an immediately-displayed menu interface is more visually disrupting than a delayed menu. These findings inform the costs and benefits of incorporating delay in marking menus, and motivate guidelines for situations in which its use is desirable.