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Over at Medium which is like having a blog but with an involuntary paywall, Don Hopkins takes on the topic of a 30-year retrospective of pie menus[*]. He discusses the history of what's happened with pie menus over the last 30 plus years and presents both good and bad examples, including ideas half baked, experiments, problems discovered, solutions attempted, alternatives explored, progress made, software freed, products shipped, as well as setbacks and impediments to their widespread adoption.
[*] Succinctly explained at Wikipedia:
In computer interface design, a pie menu (also known as a radial menu) is a circular context menu where selection depends on direction. It is a graphical control element. A pie menu is made of several "pie slices" around an inactive center and works best with stylus input, and well with a mouse. Pie slices are drawn with a hole in the middle for an easy way to exit the menu.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by Marand on Wednesday May 30 2018, @07:39PM
Like the article mentions, the large target and close proximity to the cursor make radial menus really useful for oft-used things. For example, one of the best things about Krita [krita.org] to me is the radial popup it has on a hotkey for a lot of common things like favourite brushes, canvas rotation, and colour selection. It's not a silver bullet, though, because radial menus start to fail when someone tries to cram too much stuff into one, or puts less useful stuff on it. You have to take some real care to find the right things to add, and the right number to keep the targets convenient.
Also, it's not about radial menus, but Bruce Tognazzini (a usability expert that used to work for Apple and defined their early human interface guidelines) has an interesting read on Fitts' Law [asktog.com] in the form of a short UI design quiz plus answers and explanations, which is a good, relatively short read on UI efficiency. The site also has some other good articles on interface design, some historical and some about interaction research done over the years, that are worth checking out if you find the topic interesting or need to make UIs. It's mouse-centric due to the background but some of it can still be relevant to touch UI design.