A pressure-sensing mouse button for multilevel click and drag

Abstract

This paper proposes a pressure-sensing mouse button that can better express the user's intention. When users use it for click or drag, the users can specify continuous parameters of the mouse operation by adjusting intensity of the button press between from lightly to strongly. For evaluating it, we conducted experiments to validate optimal number of pressure levels and to compare the mouse with conventional input methods. Subjects required significantly more time with eight pressure levels than with fewer levels. We also found that the mouse was not faster than conventional mice in terms of task performance time because users were not adept at adjusting force of the mouse button. We, therefore, suggest that an effective operation for the pressure-sensing mouse button is to change an insignificant effective parameter associated with fundamental determination of a mouse operation. © IFIP International Federation for Information Processing 2007.