Don't click, paint! Using toggle maps to manipulate sets of toggle switches

Abstract

A toggle map is a set of toggle switches that allows the manipulation of several switches with a single mouse drag interaction. Because toggle switches are functionally equivalent to black and white pixels, interaction techniques from paint programs can be adopted for this task. A controlled experiment shows that toggle maps can speed up interfaces containing many toggle switches, such as the interactive definition of user profiles. Toggle maps can also be applied to segmented continuous variables. As an example an efficient timer dialog is presented.