Calculation of Totally Optimized Button Configurations Using Fitts' Law

Different (key)strokes for different folks: How standard and nonstandard typists balance Fitts' law and Hick's law.

Fine motor skills like typing involve a mapping problem that trades Fitts' law against Hick's law. Eight fingers have to be mapped onto 26 keys. Movement time increases with distance, so Fitts' law is optimized by recruiting more fingers. Choice difficulty increases with the number of alternatives, so Hick's law is optimized by recruiting fewer fingers. The effect of the number of alternatives ...

Human Interaction with Small Haptic Effects

This research investigated the ability of subjects to detect small haptic effects, and the associated gains in task performance with various configurations of haptic stimulus. Variations in amplitude, shape, and pulse duration were studied. An adaptive thresholding method was used to obtain detection thresholds for actively explored haptic icons ranging in size from 3 to 5 mm, smooth vs rough a...

The Power Model of Fitts' Law Does Not Encompass the Logarithmic Model

Whether Fitts’ law, a well-known model of human pointing movement, is a logarithmic law or a power law has remained unclear so far. In two widely cited papers, Meyer et al. have claimed that the power model they derived from their celebrated stochastic optimized-submovement theory encompasses the logarithmic model as a limiting case. We show that Meyer et al.’s theory implies in fact a quasi-lo...

The Optimal Calculation Method to Determine the Effective Target Width for the Application of Fitts' Law

The Design and Evaluation of a Flick Gesture for 'Back' and 'Forward' in Web Browsers

Web navigation relies heavily on the use of the ‘back’ button to traverse pages. The traditional back button suffers from the distance and targeting issues that govern Fitts’ Law. An alternative to the button approach is the use of marking menus—a gesture based technique shown to improve access times of commonly repeated tasks. This paper describes the implementation and evaluation of a gesture...