PointAssist: helping four year olds point with ease

Children's difficulty in point-and-click tasks using indirect pointing devices such as the mouse has been documented in several studies. This difficulty is manifested in a lack of control near the target, which often results in children clicking inaccurately. This paper presents and evaluates PointAssist, a tool that helps children in pointing tasks by detecting the type of motion that occurs when children have difficulty pointing at a target, and triggering a precision mode that slows the speed of the mouse cursor in those cases. We conducted a study with 30 four year old participants who completed point-and-click tasks with and without PointAssist. PointAssist provided participants with significant advantages in terms of click accuracy, enabling them to be as accurate as 18 to 22 year olds in a previous study with a very similar setup. Keywords Human-computer interaction, children, mouse, pointing tasks, sub-movements, algorithm. ACM Classification Keywords H.5.2 [Information I...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2008
• Where: ACMIDC
• Authors: Juan Pablo Hourcade, Keith B. Perry, Aditya Sharma
• Keywords: ACMIDC 2008, Children's Difficulty, Human Computer Interaction, Indirect Pointing Devices, Point-and-click Tasks