Beyond Fitts' Law: Models for Trajectory-Based HCI Tasks

Trajectory-based interactions, such as navigating through nested-menus, drawing curves, and moving in 3D worlds, are becoming common tasks in modern computer interfaces. Users’ performances in these tasks cannot be successfully modeled with Fitts’ law as it has been applied to pointing tasks. Therefore we explore the possible existence of robust regularities in trajectory-based tasks. We used “steering through tunnels” as our experimental paradigm to represent such tasks, and found that a simple “steering law” indeed exists. The paper presents the motivation, analysis, a series of four experiments, and the applications of the steering law. Keywords Fitts’ law, human performance, modeling, movements, path steering, task difficulty, motor control, input techniques and devices, trajectory-based interaction

• Type: Conference
• Year: 1997
• Where: CHI
• Authors: Johnny Accot, Shumin Zhai
• Keywords: CHI 1997, Common Tasks, Human Computer Interaction, Steering Law, Trajectory-based Interaction