Fitts' law and expanding targets: Experimental studies and designs for user interfaces

Recently, there has been renewed interest in techniques for facilitating the selection of user interface widgets or other on-screen targets with a pointing device. We report research into using target expansion for facilitating selection. Widgets that expand or grow in response to the user's fo...

Ausführliche Beschreibung

Gespeichert in:
Bibliographische Detailangaben
Veröffentlicht in:ACM transactions on computer-human interaction 2005-12, Vol.12 (4), p.388-422
Hauptverfasser: McGuffin, Michael J., Balakrishnan, Ravin
Format: Artikel
Sprache:eng
Schlagworte:
Online-Zugang:Volltext
Tags: Tag hinzufügen
Keine Tags, Fügen Sie den ersten Tag hinzu!
Beschreibung
Zusammenfassung:Recently, there has been renewed interest in techniques for facilitating the selection of user interface widgets or other on-screen targets with a pointing device. We report research into using target expansion for facilitating selection. Widgets that expand or grow in response to the user's focus of attention allow for a reduced initial size which can help optimize screen space use and may be easier to select than targets that do not expand. However, selection performance could plausibly suffer from a decreased initial widget size. We describe an experiment in which users select a single, isolated target button that expands just before it is selected. Our results show that users benefit from target expansion even if the target only begins expanding after 90% of the distance to the target has been travelled. Furthermore, our results suggest that, for sufficiently large ID values, users are able to take approximately full advantage of the expanded target size. For interfaces with multiple expanding widgets, however, subtle problems arise due to the collisions or overlap that may occur between adjacent expanding widgets. We give a detailed examination of the issues involved in both untiled and tiled multiple expanding targets and present various design strategies for improving their performance.
ISSN:1073-0516
1557-7325
DOI:10.1145/1121112.1121115