Insight into goal-directed movements: Beyond Fitts' law

Abstract

Various methods and measures have been developed to assess the quality of input devices and interaction techniques. One approach to investigating the performance of input devices and interaction techniques is to focus on the quality of the produced movements. The current paper proposes a new method of analyzing goal-directed movements by dividing them into meaningful phases. In addition to the proposed analysis method a selection of measures is suggested to assess different aspects of rapidly aimed movements. In order to evaluate the added value of the proposed analysis method an experiment has been conducted to compare two input devices (mouse versus stylus with tablet) with respect to their performance on a multi-directional pointing task. The results show that the analysis into several phases reveals clear differences in the movement strategy. © 2009 Springer.