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Topic: Fitts law


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In the News (Thu 24 Dec 09)

  
 Fitts' Law   (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-11-05)
Fitts' law is a robust model of human psychomotor behavior developed in 1954.
Fitts discovered that movement time was a logarithmic function of distance when target size was held constant, and that movement time was also a logarithmic function of target size when distance was held constant.
Fitts' law is an effective method of modeling rapid, aimed movements, where one appendage (like a hand) starts at rest at a specific start position, and moves to rest within a target area.
ei.cs.vt.edu /~cs5724/g1   (453 words)

  
 CHI 97: Beyond Fitts' Law: Models for Trajectory-Based HCI Tasks
What Fitts' laws revealed is a somewhat intuitive tradeoff in human movement: the faster we move, the less precise our movements are, or vice versa: the more severe the constraints are, the slower we move.
Paul Fitts [7] formulated such a tradeoff in three experimental tasks (bar strip tapping, disk transfer, and nail insertion) that are essentially in one paradigm: hitting a target over certain distance.
Fitts' law is one of the very few robust and quantitative laws that can be applied to human-computer interaction research and design.
sigchi.org /chi97/proceedings/paper/ja.htm   (4707 words)

  
 Fitts' law - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Experiments that reproduce Fitts' results, and/or demonstrate the applicability of Fitts' law in somewhat different situations, are not difficult to perform.
Fitts' law remains one of the few hard, reliable human-computer interaction predictive models, joined more recently by the Accot-Zhai steering law, which is derived from Fitts' law.
The logarithm in Fitts' law is called the index of difficulty ID for the target, and has units of bits.
en.wikipedia.org /wiki/Fitts'_law   (1629 words)

  
 Fitts's law applied to the web - scottberkun.com   (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-11-05)
The basic idea in Fitts's Law is that any time a person uses a mouse to move the mouse pointer, certain characteristics of objects on the screen make them easy or hard to click on.
Fitts wrote several papers describing these findings, with significant mathematical rigor, expressing in formulas how you can measure the impact of different velocities, distances, and target sizes on a user's ability to click on objects.
Applying Fitts's Law to this example, it's clear that the individual items are difficult targets, and the likelihood of errors or the user needing extra time to target it properly are very high.
www.scottberkun.com /essays/essay09.htm   (1093 words)

  
 mezzoblue  §  Fitts' Law
Fitts' Law is a good HCI model for web designers to understand, but it's important to remember that it's only valid if the user actually knows how big the click target is. In the case of Mezzoblue, the user has to guess, because there is no defined target area.
Fitt's law need to be enhanced with 2D space or even better an "angle of attack" within a 2D space.
Fitt's law is only a measurement of the how long it takes to acquire or modifying an object, not the actual activation of the object (GOMS), not the time it takes to initiate the move (GOMS), nor the time it takes to decide which object to manipulate (Hick's law).
www.mezzoblue.com /archives/2004/08/19/fitts_law   (4486 words)

  
 Law.com - Cozen O'Connor Endows Penn Law Professorship
Fitts suggested an endowed professorship, and the firm's partnership agreed.
Fitts said it's very unusual for a law firm to endow a chair.
Fitts said the school hopes to strengthen its current programs and that the faculty is the most important aspect to maintaining and improving the quality of the school.
www.law.com /jsp/article.jsp?id=1067350961132   (406 words)

  
 [No title]
Fitts' law, a one-dimensional model of human movement, is commonly applied to two-dimensional target acquisition tasks on interactive computing systems.
The contribution of the present paper is in extending Fitts' law to 2D target acquisition tasks and in alleviating common weaknesses in applying the model.
This model is theoretically attractive since it retains the one-dimensionality of Fitts' law; however, the approach angle (as well as the width, height, and amplitude) must be known a priori.
www.billbuxton.com /fitts92.html   (4175 words)

  
 Generalized Fitts' Law Model Builder
Fitts' law is a relation derived from information theory (specifically Shannon's Theorem 17) which very successfully models human movement.
Fitts' law models rapid, aimed, movements, where one appendage (like a hand) starts at rest at a specific start position, and moves to rest within a target area.
It has been established that Fitts' law provides an accurate and efficacious means to predict the movement time of a pointing device being manipulated by a human operator.
dynamicnetservices.com /~will/academic/gflmb.webpage.html   (676 words)

  
 Mind Hacks: Size and selection times: Fitts's Law   (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-11-05)
Fitts's Law is an example of a principle in psychology which was developed from information theory (you can read more about this here [1]).
Fitt's law dictates that the windows task bar will constantly and unnecessarily get in people's way, and this is proven out.
Fitt's law indicates that the most quickly accessed targets on any computer display are the four corners of the screen, because of their pinning action, and yet they seem to be avoided at all costs by designers.
www.mindhacks.com /blog/2005/01/size_and_selection_t.html   (926 words)

  
 online! Cybernetic Understanding of Fitts' Law
This chapter summarises a lot of current knowledge on Fitts' Law and related models of motor movement, but in common with most of the field focusing more on what the behaviour is rather than why it occurs.
This shows that Fitts' Law continues to hold if one is able to zoom the interface in continuously as well as move towards the target, and also for cases where the target is off screen and one is guided by bulls-eye style circles radiating from it.
Fitts' Law is used in Chapter 12 to predict typing speed as part of the Keystroke Level Model (KLM) (section 12.5, pp.
www.hcibook.com /e3/online/fitts-cybernetic   (1902 words)

  
 A Tool for the Rapid Evaluation of Input Devices Using Fitts' Law Models
Fitts' information processing model has been used widely in previous HCI research and holds considerable promise as a tool for design (Card, Mackinlay, and Robertson, 1990; MacKenzie, in press, 1992; Marchionini and Sibert, 1991; Newell and Card, 1985).
Unfortunately, substantial theoretical and methodological problems exist in applying Fitts' law, with the result that the potential to actually use prediction models (or metrics such as bandwidth), is seriously compromised (MacKenzie, 1992).
As shown in Figures 3 and 4 the correlations increased slightly from the Fitts to the Welford to the Shannon formulations; however, the correlations on the whole were lower using normalized measures.
www.billbuxton.com /fitts93.html   (2804 words)

  
 A Web-based Test of Fitts' Law   (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-11-05)
We are studying Fitts' Law, a model of human motor response developed by Paul Fitts in 1954.
Fitts' Law has been applied by Human Factors and Ergonomics engineers to thousands of designs ranging from assembly lines to computer interfaces.
Since Fitts' model is so influential, it is important to verify its accuracy and to consider alternative models.
www.tele-actor.net /fitts   (138 words)

  
 About the Firm   (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-11-05)
The partnership, Fitts and Olson, was formed in 1955 when Osmer Fitts became a partner with Paul N. Olson, who had been associated with Mr.
Fitts, Olson and Giddings retains an old-fashioned dedication to personal service and attention to detail while integrating the efficiency of modern technology into its practice.
Fitts, Olson and Giddings is a supporter of many nonprofit organizations in the community and is a member of the Brattleboro Chamber of Commerce and Building A Better Brattleboro (BABB).
www.foglaw.com   (553 words)

  
 Fitts’ Law and Text Links at go.   (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-11-05)
Fitts’ Law is beneficial from an accessibilty standpoint and a usability standpont
Fitts’ law is appropriate for navigation and tool button elements, but I’m not sure it’s appropriate at all for normal web text links.
This is why I hate calling heuristic guidelines “laws” — it tends to make people try to conform to letter of the law to the point of defeating the spirit of the law itself.
www.dbenton.com /go/chronicles/2004/08/22/fitts-law-and-text-links   (1996 words)

  
 Flazoom.com - Making Sure Usability 'Fitts' Flash
Fitt's Law states: The time to acquire a target is a function of the distance to and size of the target.
He developed formulas to measure the impact of different velocities, distances, and target sizes on a user's 'ease of click.' Fitt's Law seems like common sense, but it is stunning how often it is ignored.
By applying Fitt's Law to a Flash presentation running full screen we can understand many useful factors that should influence the placement of important elements.
www.flazoom.com /news/fitts_07102000.shtml   (1218 words)

  
 Fitts' Law, Psychomotor Performance and Intelligence.
Evidence indicated adherence to simplex structure, group and intraindividual conformity to Fitts' law and a hitherto unreported linear relationship between variability and the pre-scaled function of target distance and width.
Interestingly, Fitts (1954) reports this value as lying within the range of 7.5 and 12.6 bits/sec in three experiments involving aimed ballistic movement, two of which incorporate various aspects of the current apparatus and procedure.
Inspection of Table 4 shows the conformity of Fitts' law for individual data to be remarkably high, at least as indicated by the mean value of the Pearson correlation of all subjects' MT over task difficulty.
www.ijoa.org /imta96/paper56.html   (9174 words)

  
 [No title]
Fitts' law was developed in 1954 by Paul Fitts and today is used as a fundamental principle of interface design.
Fitts' Law is a model that predicts human movement and human motion based on rapid, aimed movement, like clicking a graphic on a computer screen with a mouse.
Fitts' law is mathematically represented as the following equation:
www.seedwiki.com /wiki/mccnm336/fitts_law.cfm?wpid=213078   (152 words)

  
 A Web-based Test of Fitts' Law - Background Info
In 1954 a psychologist named Paul Fitts of Ohio State University and later the University of Michigan developed a model of human movement based on rapid, aimed movement.
Fitts, P. The information capacity of the human motor system in controlling the amplitude of movement.
Summary: Fitts' Law is widely used as a predictor for movement time of mouse based cursor transfers between objects in a graphical user interface.
www.tele-actor.net /fitts/fitts_background.html   (638 words)

  
 Coding Horror: Fitts' Law and Infinite Width
Fitts' Law is arguably the most important formula in the field of human-computer interaction.
Fitts' law has been shown to apply under a variety of conditions, with many different limbs (hands, feet, head-mounted sights, eye gaze), manipulanda (input devices), physical environments (including underwater!), and user populations (young, old, mentally retarded, and drugged participants).
Yes and no. Fitts' Law is an example of no. It is true, like it or not, know about it or not, used to it or not.
www.codinghorror.com /blog/archives/000642.html   (4800 words)

  
 kuwamoto.org » Blog Archive » Usability is sometimes subtle (Fitts’ law, etc.)
I’d always thought that Fitts’ law was a bit silly.
I first became aware of it during the mac/windows flamewars on USENET, in which people claimed that Macs were superior because, among other things, the menubar was on the top of the screen, and thus easier to aim for with the mouse.
Fitts’ law says that bigger things are easier to reach with the mouse than smaller things, and the farther away the thing is, the more this matters.
kuwamoto.org /2006/05/05/usability-is-sometimes-subtle-fitts-law-etc   (1035 words)

  
 Penn Law Faculty: Michael A. Fitts
Today Penn Law has a strong cross-disciplinary perspective that starts in the Law School classroom and extends to the certificate and joint programs throughout the University, from a joint degree from Wharton to one in Bioethics at the Medical School.
Fitts began his career as an Attorney Advisor to the Office of Legal Counsel in the Department of Justice, which serves as outside Counsel to the President, White House and Cabinet.
He is a member of the Law and Political Process Study Group of American Political Science Association and the Committee of Seventy, a community watch-dog group.
www.law.upenn.edu /cf/faculty/mfitts   (487 words)

  
 applying fitts' law (xmouse)   (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-11-05)
Fitts’ law is may appear blindingly obvious at first, but a lot of people aren’t using it as much as possible: doing so makes for the easiest possible navigation of your site, and it’s easy to see many opportunities for implementation.
One of the most used targets in terms of your average website has to be the navigational links: they’re needed all the time by any user wishing to go from one section of the website to another.
Hence, applying Fitts’ law here (as Dave Shea has) would make for massive reductions in target acquisition time.
xmouse.ithium.net /essays/applying-fitts-law   (642 words)

  
 GameDev.net - Motor Skill Learning in User Interfaces via Discretized Pie Menus
Fitts' Law is a logarithmic function describing the index of difficulty (ID) in movement based motor tasks [4, 5].
Many HCI researchers have used Fitts' Law [7] with one of the first uses emerging from the work of Card, English, and Burr [2].
Though Fitts' Law deals with movements in one dimension, it has been shown by Mackenzie [7] that the law can be extended to two dimensions.
www.gamedev.net /reference/articles/article2230.asp   (1864 words)

  
 Jensen Harris: An Office User Interface Blog : Giving You Fitts   (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-11-05)
Named for Paul Fitts, a psychologist at Ohio State University, Fitts' Law is a mathematical model of fine motor control which predicts how long it takes to move from one position to another as a function of the distance to and size of the target area.
Fitts himself was an expert in aviation psychology, and he developed his research around more ergonomic layouts for cockpit instrumentation as a way of increasing aviation safety.
Although Fitts' model was originally formulated to project how quickly a human could point at a physical button, it turns out that the same set of rules governs how quickly someone can target an area on the screen with a mouse cursor.
blogs.msdn.com /jensenh/archive/2006/08/22/711808.aspx   (8529 words)

  
 mprove: thesis: Fitts' Law
Fitts' Law: The time to acquire a target is a function of the distance to and size of the target.
describes lucidly what Fitts’ Law is, how it has been applied, and what the many refinements are, i.e.
Fitts’ Law first used to study HCI in [Card et al.
www.mprove.de /diplom/gui/fittslaw.html   (351 words)

  
 Usability First: Usability Glossary: Fitts' Law
Fitts' Law is a model to account for the time it takes to point at something, based on the size and distance of the target object.
Fitts' Law and variations of it are used to model the time it takes to use a mouse and other input devices to click on objects on a screen.
Broadly, Fitts' Law can be applied by designers to suggest moving target buttons closer and making them larger for extremely commonly used buttons.
usabilityfirst.com /glossary/main.cgi?function=display_term&term_id=265   (141 words)

  
 Generalized Fitts' Law Model Builder
The Generalized Fitts' Law Model Builder (GFLMB) is a software tool which allows the experimenter to design experiments, capture data, and build models using Fitts' law.
Features intended for both HCI educational purposes and experimental research are included, making this a very powerful utility for research in input techniques or Fitts' law.
This feature allows for more Fitts' Law studies to be replicated then was possible with version 1.0.
dynamicnetservices.com /~will/academic/gflmb.manual.html   (2894 words)

  
 Walker Software Weblog » Blog Archive » Giving JTree Fitts
Fitt’s law is a mathematical model of human muscle movement.
Fitts’ law is used to good effect in most modern OSes.
In Mac OS the menubar is along the top edge, the dock item’s hotspots extend to the edge of the screen, the old thin window borders are gone in favor of easier to hit “grow box”, etc. In Windows, if you slam the down mouse down into the corner, you can click the “start menu”.
www.walkersoftware.net /2005/09/22/giving-jtree-fitts   (886 words)

  
 Hick's Law and Fitts's Law
But not huge; the log to the base two in the formula means that, as with Hick's Law, the efficiency gains are sublinear and fall off as the ratio rises, and that gain has to be traded off against the value of other uses for the screen space.
For the precise mathematical statements of both Hick's Law and Fitts's Law, see the discussion in [Raskin].
In fact Fitts's Law tells us that the most easily targeted areas would be the (unbordered) four corners of the screen, which have offscreen landing zones on two sides.
www.catb.org /~esr/writings/taouu/html/ch04s03.html   (416 words)

  
 Column Two: What is Fitts law? and its relation to HCI
Fredy D. Ore has posted a weblog entry on Fitts Law, and its relationship to usability.
Fitts Law is a robust model of human behavior which enables the prediction of human movement and human motion based on rapid, aimed movement other than drawing or writing.
In Human Computer Interaction (HCI) Fitt's law is a useful guideline in interface design.
www.steptwo.com.au /columntwo/archives/000790.html   (77 words)

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