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Visualizing Fitts's Law (2007)

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Re: Visualizing Fitts's Law (2007)

#21

Post by oneplane »

eitland wrote: post #18
oneplane wrote: post #6

IIRC this is one of the reasons the UI on the Mac opted for a fixed context-dependant menu bar at the top of the screen instead of the per-window one used by Windows (and Java). It's basically 'fling your pointing device at the top' and 'go left or right to get the button you want'. Due to the lack of borders/stops, this would be harder if it was sandwiched between a titlebar and window content.

Used a Mac full time three years. Having to -move the pointer diagonally across two screens, then pick something in a submenu (carefully, I think the submenu disappears if you don’t hit the end of the first menu and instead tries to move directly to the item in the sub menu) - and back again is one of the things I never miss.

macOS treats click-hold and click-release differently for menus. Click-hold is for when you want the menu to disappear by itself, click-release for when you want it to stay open until you click on something else.

Re: Visualizing Fitts's Law (2007)

#22

Post by whoisjuan »

seanmcdirmid wrote: post #11
deventis wrote: post #4

Laws of UX has a nice overview of the different laws that exist in user experience! Fitt's law: https://lawsofux.com/fittss-law

Principles of interaction design has even more entries and is quite detailed. Unfortunately, it’s a book that isn’t free!

I think you meant: "Principles of Interactive Design" by Lisa Graham. Right?

Re: Visualizing Fitts's Law (2007)

#23

Post by seanmcdirmid »

whoisjuan wrote: post #22
seanmcdirmid wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Principles of interaction design has even more entries and is quite detailed. Unfortunately, it’s a book that isn’t free!

I think you meant: "Principles of Interactive Design" by Lisa Graham. Right?

No. I got the name completely wrong:

https://books.google.com/books?id=3RFyaF7jCZsC&printsec=fron...

Universal principles of design. The book is like an encyclopedia of design principles.

Re: Visualizing Fitts's Law (2007)

#24

Post by 205guy »

oneplane wrote: post #6

IIRC this is one of the reasons the UI on the Mac opted for a fixed context-dependant menu bar at the top of the screen instead of the per-window one used by Windows (and Java). It's basically 'fling your pointing device at the top' and 'go left or right to get the button you want'. Due to the lack of borders/stops, this would be harder if it was sandwiched between a titlebar and window content.

The reasoning is that mouse stops the border of the screen no matter how far the mouse is moved, making an effective target that is huge off the screen, so easy and quick to hit. This would hold true even with large screens, unless you dial down the acceleration of the mouse for fine control--as others have pointed out.

But the issue is Apple broke the whole mechanism with hot corners. Now if I move fast anywhere near a hot corner, it gets activated. And now the menu bar near the corners is tiny and hard to hit with a "huge" hot corner right nearby (the hot corner gets the benefit of the inifinte off-screen target). I find the same problems will full-size browsers (with tabs along the top), I'm always hitting the hot corners instead of the top lerpft and right tabs. I guess I can always change my corner settings.

Additional gripe about the top menu in MacOS: the biggest fault I've found is that it can be active for an app whose windows are hidden or that currently have any windows, thus creating a mismatch between what you see (other windows) and what is active (responding to keyboard shortcuts for example).

Re: Visualizing Fitts's Law (2007)

#25

Post by lloeki »

205guy wrote: post #24
oneplane wrote: post #6

IIRC this is one of the reasons the UI on the Mac opted for a fixed context-dependant menu bar at the top of the screen instead of the per-window one used by Windows (and Java). It's basically 'fling your pointing device at the top' and 'go left or right to get the button you want'. Due to the lack of borders/stops, this would be harder if it was sandwiched between a titlebar and window content.

The reasoning is that mouse stops the border of the screen no matter how far the mouse is moved, making an effective target that is huge off the screen, so easy and quick to hit. This would hold true even with large screens, unless you dial down the acceleration of the mouse for fine control--as others have pointed out. But the issue is Apple broke the whole mechanism with hot corners. Now if I move fast anywhere nea…

> But the issue is Apple broke the whole mechanism with hot corners.

Well I always hated hot corners, and anyway by default they're disabled on macOS.

Re: Visualizing Fitts's Law (2007)

#27

Post by todd8 »

On some early graphical computer user interface, I can’t remember which one, one could specify that the mouse cursor would “wrap” to the opposite edge. It was like the ultimate non-Fitt’s law configuration. I hated it when I tried it, I would lose the cursor and not be able to find it.

Re: Visualizing Fitts's Law (2007)

#28

Post by natecavanaugh »

205guy wrote: post #24
oneplane wrote: post #6

IIRC this is one of the reasons the UI on the Mac opted for a fixed context-dependant menu bar at the top of the screen instead of the per-window one used by Windows (and Java). It's basically 'fling your pointing device at the top' and 'go left or right to get the button you want'. Due to the lack of borders/stops, this would be harder if it was sandwiched between a titlebar and window content.

The reasoning is that mouse stops the border of the screen no matter how far the mouse is moved, making an effective target that is huge off the screen, so easy and quick to hit. This would hold true even with large screens, unless you dial down the acceleration of the mouse for fine control--as others have pointed out. But the issue is Apple broke the whole mechanism with hot corners. Now if I move fast anywhere nea…

I'm super happy you brought up the infinite border aspect of the top menu, because that is the best aspect of it, and whenever I go back to Windows, that required fine touch control drives me nuts.

But WRT hot corners, the best part of hot corners is being able to assign a modifier key to them. Without using the modifier, it's crazy annoying, but having a modal aspect that requires active engagement seems to me the best of both.

Then again, I haven't actually engaged a hot corner in years. I find Keyboard Maestro the best option of all.

(P.S. just for anyone who doesn't know how to add a modifier to the hot corners, just hold down Ctrl, shift, option or CMD when selecting the setting).

Re: Visualizing Fitts's Law (2007)

#29

Post by DonHopkins »

walterbell wrote: post #8

How does this work with radial menus and touch interfaces?

Pie menus benefit from Fitts' Law by minimizing the target distance to a small constant (the radius of the inactive region in the menu center where the cursor starts) and maximizing the target area of each item (a wedge shaped slice that extends to the edge of the screen).

They also have the advantage that you don't need to focus your visual attention on hitting the target (which linear menus require), because you can move in any direction into a big slice without looking at the screen (while parking the cursor in a little rectangle requires visual feedback), and you can learn to use them with muscle memory, with quick "mouse ahead" gestures.

http://www.donhopkins.com/drupal/node/100

An Empirical Comparison of Pie vs. Linear Menus

Jack Callahan, Don Hopkins, Mark Weiser (+) and Ben Shneiderman. Computer Science Department University of Maryland College Park, Maryland 20742 (+) Computer Science Laboratory, Xerox PARC, Palo Alto, Calif. 94303. Presented at ACM CHI'88 Conference, Washington DC, 1988.

Abstract

Menus are largely formatted in a linear fashion listing items from the top to bottom of the screen or window. Pull down menus are a common example of this format. Bitmapped computer displays, however, allow greater freedom in the placement, font, and general presentation of menus. A pie menu is a format where the items are placed along the circumference of a circle at equal radial distances from the center. Pie menus gain over traditional linear menus by reducing target seek time, lowering error rates by fixing the distance factor and increasing the target size in Fitts's Law, minimizing the drift distance after target selection, and are, in general, subjectively equivalent to the linear style.

http://www.donhopkins.com/drupal/node/98

The Design and Implementation of Pie Menus -- Dr. Dobb's Journal, Dec. 1991

There're Fast, Easy, and Self-Revealing.

Copyright (C) 1991 by Don Hopkins.

Originally published in Dr. Dobb's Journal, Dec. 1991, lead cover story, user interface issue.

Introduction

Although the computer screen is two-dimensional, today most users of windowing environments control their systems with a one-dimensional list of choices -- the standard pull-down or drop-down menus such as those found on Microsoft Windows, Presentation Manager, or the Macintosh.

This article describes an alternative user-interface technique I call "pie" menus, which is two-dimensional, circular, and in many ways easier to use and faster than conventional linear menus. Pie menus also work well with alternative pointing devices such as those found in stylus or pen-based systems. I developed pie menus at the University of Maryland in 1986 and have been studying and improving them over the last five years.

During that time, pie menus have been implemented by myself and my colleagues on four different platforms: X10 with the uwm window manager, SunView, NeWS with the Lite Toolkit, and OpenWindows with the NeWS Toolkit. Fellow researchers have conducted both comparison tests between pie menus and linear menus, and also tests with different kinds of pointing devices, including mice, pens, and trackballs.

Included with this article are relevant code excerpts from the most recent NeWS implementation, written in Sun's object-oriented PostScript dialect.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jvi98wVUmQA

Demo of Pie Menus in SimCity for X11. Ported to Unix and demonstrated by Don Hopkins.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SG0FAKkaisg

Pet Rock Remote Control: Pie menu remote control touch screen interface for sending commands to pet rocks.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2KfeHNIXYUc

MediaGraph Music Navigation with Pie Menus Prototype developed for Will Wright's Stupid Fun Club: This is a demo of a user interface research prototype that I developed for Will Wright at the Stupid Fun Club. It includes pie menus, an editable map of music interconnected with roads, and cellular automata.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-exdu4ETscs

The Sims, Pie Menus, Edith Editing, and SimAntics Visual Programming Demo: This is a demonstration of the pie menus, architectural editing tools, and Edith visual programming tools that I developed for The Sims with Will Wright at Maxis and Electronic Arts.

Re: Visualizing Fitts's Law (2007)

#30

Post by walterbell »

DonHopkins wrote: post #29
walterbell wrote: post #8

How does this work with radial menus and touch interfaces?

Pie menus benefit from Fitts' Law by minimizing the target distance to a small constant (the radius of the inactive region in the menu center where the cursor starts) and maximizing the target area of each item (a wedge shaped slice that extends to the edge of the screen). They also have the advantage that you don't need to focus your visual attention on hitting the target (which linear menus require), because you ca…

Thanks for the references!

Any idea why these are not often used with touchscreen mobile interfaces, e.g. press for contextual pie menu? Even without OS support, they could be implemented within apps.

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