Hover or tap?: supporting pen-based menu navigation for older adults

Tablet PCs are gaining popularity, but many users, particularly older ones, still struggle with pen-based interaction. One type of error, drifting, occurs when users accidentally hover over an adjacent menu, causing their focus menu to close and the adjacent one to open. In this paper, we propose two approaches to address drifting. The first, tap, requires an explicit tap to switch menus, and thus, eliminates the possibility of a drift. The second, glide, uses a distance threshold to delay switching, and thereby reduce the likelihood of a drift. We performed a comparative evaluation of our approaches with a control interface. Tap was effective at reducing drifts for both groups, but it was only popular among older users. Glide surprisingly did not show any performance improvement. Additional research is needed to determine if the negative findings for glide are a result of the particular threshold used, or reflect a fundamental flaw in the glide approach.