Investigating pointing tasks across angularly coupled display areas

Abstract

Pointing tasks are a crucial part of today's graphical user interfaces. They are well understood for flat displays and most prominently are modeled through Fitts' Law. For novel displays (e.g., curved displays with multi-purpose areas), however, it remains unclear whether such models for predicting user performance still hold - in particular when pointing is performed across differently oriented areas. To answer this question, we conducted an experiment on an angularly coupled display - the Curve - with two input conditions: direct touch and indirect mouse pointer. Our findings show that the target position affects overall pointing speed and offset in both conditions. However, we also found that Fitts' Law can in fact still be used to predict performance as on flat displays. Our results help designers to optimize user interfaces on angularly coupled displays when pointing tasks are involved. © 2013 IFIP International Federation for Information Processing.