Updating Fitts' Law to Account for Restricted Display Field of View Conditions

The field of view (FOV) restricted displays are becoming more prevalent in daily use, such as touch-screen-based smart phones; ultramobile PCs; and, to some extent, head-mounted displays. All of these displays occupy significantly smaller portions of a user's FOV compared to standard desktop and laptop displays. Prior research has shown that there is an effect of display size, which is related with display FOV, on movement time (MT) when performing pointing tasks. However, there has yet to be a detailed, quantitative study of how display FOV affects MT across a wide range of FOV values. In the present study two user experiments are conducted, and it is found that Fitts' law is no longer adequate for modeling MT if the display FOV is restricted below a certain value, which we call the critical size. A new Fitts'-FOV model is proposed to extend Fitts' law beyond this critical size to restricted display FOV conditions. The results showed that the new model works as both a descriptive and a predictive model for restricted display FOV conditions.

[1]  I. Scott MacKenzie,et al.  Towards a standard for pointing device evaluation, perspectives on 27 years of Fitts' law research in HCI , 2004, Int. J. Hum. Comput. Stud..

[2]  Yves Guiard,et al.  The problem of consistency in the design of Fitts' law experiments: consider either target distance and width or movement form and scale , 2009, CHI.

[3]  Shumin Zhai,et al.  Characterizing computer input with Fitts' law parameters-the information and non-information aspects of pointing , 2004, Int. J. Hum. Comput. Stud..

[4]  Martina Ziefle,et al.  Considerations on Efficient Touch Interfaces - How Display Size Influences the Performance in an Applied Pointing Task , 2007, HCI.

[5]  J. Shawn Farris,et al.  Kinematic Analysis of Cursor Trajectories Controlled With a Touchpad , 2005, Int. J. Hum. Comput. Interact..

[6]  Sang D. Choi,et al.  Study of Computer Input Devices and Older Users , 2009 .

[7]  Stephen L. R. Ellison,et al.  Practical Statistics for the Analytical Scientist: A Bench Guide , 2009 .

[8]  Yves Guiard,et al.  Target acquisition in multiscale electronic worlds , 2004, Int. J. Hum. Comput. Stud..

[9]  Daniel Vogel,et al.  The Impact of Control-Display Gain on User Performance in Pointing Tasks , 2008, Hum. Comput. Interact..

[10]  C. E. SHANNON,et al.  A mathematical theory of communication , 1948, MOCO.

[11]  Martina Ziefle,et al.  Psychomotor Efficiency in Users of Notebook Input Devices: Confirmation and Restrictions of Fitts' Law as an Evaluative Tool for User-Friendly Design , 2004 .

[12]  Atsuo Murata,et al.  Extending Effective Target Width in Fitts' Law to a Two-Dimensional Pointing Task , 1999, Int. J. Hum. Comput. Interact..

[13]  Shumin Zhai,et al.  Scale effects in steering law tasks , 2001, CHI.

[14]  W. Dixon,et al.  Simplified Statistics for Small Numbers of Observations , 1951 .

[15]  Laure Fernandez,et al.  Effects of biomechanical and task constraints on the organization of movement in precision aiming , 2004, Experimental Brain Research.

[16]  C. B. Gibbs,et al.  Controller design Interactions of controlling limbs, time-lags and gains in positional and velocity systems , 1962 .

[17]  P. Fitts.  The information capacity of the human motor system in controlling the amplitude of movement. , 1954, Journal of experimental psychology.

[18]  Lindsay W. MacDonald,et al.  Tutorial: Using Color Effectively in Computer Graphics , 1999, IEEE Computer Graphics and Applications.

[19]  I. Scott MacKenzie,et al.  Extending Fitts' law to two-dimensional tasks , 1992, CHI.

[20]  I. MacKenzie,et al.  A note on the information-theoretic basis of Fitts' law. , 1989, Journal of motor behavior.

[21]  MacKenzie Is.  A Note on the Information-Theoretic Basis for Fitts’ Law , 1989 .

[22]  T. S. West.  Analytical Chemistry , 1969, Nature.

[23]  Sang Joon Kim,et al.  A Mathematical Theory of Communication , 2006 .

[24]  R. Näsänen,et al.  The effect of icon spacing and size on the speed of icon processing in the human visual system , 2003 .