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Hierarchical menus are now ubiquitous. The performance of the menu depends on many factors: structure, layout, colors and so on. There has been extensive research on novel menus, but there has been little work on improving the performance by optimizing the menu's structure. This paper proposes an algorithm based on the genetic algorithm (GA) for optimizing the performance of menus. The algorithm aims to minimize the average selection time of menu items by considering movement and decision time. We show results on a static hierarchical menu of a cellular phone where a small screen and limited input device are assumed. Our work makes several contributions: a novel mathematical optimization model for hierarchical menus; novel optimization method based on the genetic algorithm (GA).