Acceleration study

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Archie
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Joined: 31 Jan 2019 15:27

Acceleration study

Post by Archie » 09 Jan 2021 00:44

Interesting works focused on analyzing how GUI performance is affected by acceleration changes. Among other things, the differences between Windows and MacOS implementations are detailed.

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User-defined transfer functions to improve pointing performance in graphical user interfaces
S.M. Hasanul Banna
Institute for Visualization and Interactive Systems (VIS)
University of Stuttgart, Germany
https://trackballs.eu/media/library/Use ... ctions.pdf
Pointing at a target is the most fundamental and frequent task in graphical user interfaces (GUIs). Pointing devices like the mouse is the most popular and cheap- est input devices for current desktop computers and the touchpad or trackpad is the best match between performance and demand of pointing devices for laptop computers. Due to the widespread and frequent use of pointing devices, even a small improvement in pointing performance can have a large effect on a system’s usability. The physical movement of a mouse or dragging motion of a finger on a touchpad is translated into the movement of a pointer on the graphical display through so-called transfer functions. Transfer functions are actually the only pointing facilitation technique available to all users in modern days operating systems. Despite the importance of transfer functions, very little is known about the nature of the optimal transfer functions.
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No more Bricolage! Methods and Tools to Characterize, Replicate and Compare Pointing Transfer Functions
Géry Casiez, Nicolas Roussel
LIFL, INRIA Lille, University of Lille
Villeneuve d’Ascq, France
https://trackballs.eu/media/library/Com ... ctions.pdf
Transfer functions are the only pointing facilitation technique actually used in modern graphical interfaces involving the indirect control of an on-screen cursor. But despite their general use, very little is known about them. We present Echo-Mouse, a device we created to characterize the transfer functions of any system, and libpointing, a toolkit that we developed to replicate and compare the ones used by Windows, OS X and Xorg. We describe these functions and report on an experiment that compared the default one of the three systems. Our results show that these default functions improve performance up to 24% compared to a unitless constant CD gain. We also found significant differences between them, with the one from OS X improving performance for small target widths but reducing its performance up to 9% for larger ones compared to Windows and Xorg. These results notably suggest replacing the constant CD gain function commonly used by HCI researchers by the default function of the considered systems.
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Semantic Pointing: Improving Target Acquisition with Control-Display Ratio Adaptation
Renaud Blanch, Yves Guiard, Michel Beaudouin-Lafon
Université Paris-Sud Orsay, Université de la Méditerranée Marseille, France
https://trackballs.eu/media/library/Sem ... sition.pdf
We introduce semantic pointing, a novel interaction technique that improves target acquisition in graphical user interfaces (GUIs). Semantic pointing uses two independent sizes for each potential target presented to the user: one size in motor space adapted to its importance for the manipulation, and one size in visual space adapted to the amount of information it conveys. This decoupling between visual and motor size is achieved by changing the control-to-display ratio according to cursor distance to nearby targets. We present a controlled experiment supporting our hypothesis that the performance of semantic pointing is given by Fitts’ index of difficulty in motor rather than visual space. We apply semantic pointing to the redesign of traditional GUI widgets by taking advantage of the independent manipulation of motor and visual widget sizes.
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The Impact of Control-Display Gain on User Performance in Pointing Tasks
Géry Casiez, Daniel Vogel, Ravin Balakrishnan, Andy Cockburn
University of Lille, University of Toronto, University of Canterbury
https://trackballs.eu/media/library/The ... y Gain.pdf
We theoretically and empirically examine the impact of control display (CD) gain on mouse pointing performance. Two techniques for modifying CD gain are considered: constant gain (CG) where CD gain is uniformly adjusted by a constant multiplier, and pointer acceleration (PA) where CD gain is adjusted using a nonuniform function depending on movement characteristics.
We found that the aggressive and continuous pointer acceleration functions used in modern operating systems perform better than constant gain, and many people use them already and are proficient with them.
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