Improving mouse navigation — a walk through the “hilly screen landscape”

Abstract

During computer interaction much time is spent navigating the graphical user interface to find and invoke functions through interface controls. If this navigation process could be optimised, users would spend less time searching for and navigating to interface controls. This paper presents a walk through an ongoing research project aimed at developing and assessing a navigation support module for mouse based interaction, which enhances standard screen pointer behaviour with position context sensitive functionality – creating a “hilly screen landscape”. The main hypothesis of this work is that a context sensitive screen pointer prevents navigation to and selection of erroneous and inappropriate interface controls, decreases pointing and selection times and contributes to increased overall usability of the application. A description of the navigation support module and hypothetical situations where such a module could prove to be useful are provided together with major implementation and evaluation issues of the project.