The New Interface Advocate

Fitts’ law vs. mice, tablets, & trackballs

Tags: interface architecture, interface design, linkedin, usability, user experience

While Fitts’ Law has been studied extensively with mice, I recently came across an interesting whitepaper comparing mice, trackballs, and (my weapon of choice) tablets.

They came to the conclusion that for pointing tasks, a tablet is slightly better than a mouse, but the mouse marginally bested the tablet for dragging tasks, while the trackball fell far behind both other tools. This does match my experience that even after a few weeks, most pointing tasks are easier on a tablet than a mouse and that dragging with a tablet is slightly awkward sometimes. I can’t say I’ve had the terrible experience that they suggest a trackball is, despite having had one when I worked a semi-recent job.

My greatest concern, however, is that they never mentioned the significant possibility that some of their subjects had experience with a mouse but none of the other devices. Granted, in 1991 the world wasn’t quite as densely populated with mouse-driven GUIs, but just a few of the user’s possible experience with mice would be more than sufficient to give them the edge over tablets that they found. Also, there’s been a little work in ergonomics in the last 16 years, so I’d like to see if the rankings still hold for first-time users of these devices.