Effectiveness of menu orientation in Chinese

Graphical user interface guidelines have been developed predominantly in English-speaking countries, but aspects related to culture (e.g., local metaphors, symbols, color, and flow) are not universal and have received little or no attention. Even though the reading and writing flow of languages such as English, Japanese, and Chinese differ widely, most software interfaces do not take account of this. In this paper we investigate the effectiveness of menu flow or menu orientation in both the Chinese and English languages for Chinese users. The experimental results indicate that for the Chinese population, a horizontal menu in either language is more effective than the vertical orientation. Thus item differentiation in menus is best performed when the natural flow of the user's native language is broken through a transformation process similar to a matrix transpose. Even though we did not investigate search strategies explicitly, we hypothesize that the primary reason for the difference lies in the scanning patterns adopted by the Chinese population in search tasks so that there is no mismatch in the reading metaphors. Applications of this research include the design of culturally and linguistically adapted human-computer interfaces for Chinese users.