Modeling user performance for moving target selection with a delayed mouse

Abstract

The growth in networking and cloud services provides opportunities to host multimedia on remote servers, but also brings challenges to developers who must deal with added delays that degrade interactivity. A fundamental action for many computer-based multimedia applications is selecting a moving target with the mouse. While previous research has modeled both moving target selection and target selection with delay, there have not been models of moving target selection with delay. Our work presents a user study that measures the effects of delay and target speed on the time to select a moving target with a mouse, with analysis of trends and derivation of a model. The analysis shows delay and speed impact target selection time exponentially and that selection time is well-represented by a model with three terms-two with exponential relationships for delay and speed and one an important interaction term.