Design of unimanual multi-finger pie menu interaction

Context menus, most commonly the right click menu, are a traditional method of interaction when using a keyboard and mouse. Context menus make a subset of commands in the application quickly available to the user. However, on tabletop touchscreen computers, context menus have all but disappeared. In this paper, we investigate how to design context menus for efficient unimanual multi-touch use. We investigate the limitations of the arm, wrist, and fingers and how it relates to human performance of multi-targets selection tasks on multi-touch surface. We show that selecting targets with multiple fingers simultaneously improves the performance of target selection compared to traditional single finger selection, but also increases errors. Informed by these results, we present our own context menu design for horizontal tabletop surfaces.