Comments on: Visualizing Fitts’s Law

By: Chapper

Chapper — Wed, 28 Nov 2007 11:34:50 +0000

Nice brainstorming on userinterface details, i hope to get to this level somethime

By: Destin

Destin — Mon, 19 Nov 2007 02:32:10 +0000

Thanks for the tips on Fitt’s Law, it’s nice to have a name for the linking convention. One thing I’ve noticed lately is a tendency of CSS designers to employ large link spaces. Many of the sites linked through CSS Vault have large link areas for main navigation. I’ve been seeing large link design for a while now, and it has bled into my own design work. I initially liked the look of the big links, but the access issues are even more reason to like it.I wonder how many designers are doing it for look and how many are conscious of Fitt’s Law. I would guess more are interested in the layout, but on the other hand I’m seeing this on well built CSS/XHTML pages, so maybe they’ve been aware all along..

By: Missy

Missy — Mon, 05 Nov 2007 08:57:17 +0000

Excellent article - has prompted me to make significant changes to my upcoming site.

By: Daniel Skinner

Daniel Skinner — Mon, 29 Oct 2007 21:42:31 +0000

Interesting read! Any idea how that logarithmic relationship was derived? I would be interested to know if it is backed up with experimental evidence. I like the idea of applying analytical techniques to interface and web design, can we see more articles like this? Anyone got any good articles to share?

By: Nerg

Nerg — Sat, 27 Oct 2007 16:39:39 +0000

@ Richard Morton

My thoughts exactly, there was a very interesting article over at coding horror on the subject of mouse ballistics, and I’d quite interested to learn if there was such a thing as scroll wheel ballistics.

Jeff Atwoods article is here

http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/000977.html

By: MikeP

MikeP — Sat, 27 Oct 2007 01:52:04 +0000

@Ross, sorry - more succinctly. The original article said, I paraphrase, “you’d think they would want to write things more clearly so ordinary people can understand them.”

Academics don’t want to be understood by ordinary people. They want to be understood by other academics, who won’t necessarily take them seriously if things are written in “ordinary people” language. If non-academics can understand the publications too, that’s not even necessarily a good thing.

But really, only the first paragraph was directed at you, the second was in response to a sentence from the original article. The first para was agreeing with you, from the perspective of somebody who does daily support for ~350 faculty members and grad students.

By: Christian Ullenboom

Christian Ullenboom — Wed, 17 Oct 2007 15:39:22 +0000

Good explanation and nice graphics (with some formulas for the hard core geeks too). I think that Apple put the menu bar for this reason for every application on the top of the screen and do not attach them to every window like Windows does. This has interesting implications: the distance for a cursor to a menu under Windows is probably shorter then on a Mac but on a Mac is might be faster because it is easy to get to the top of the frame. Fitts’s law can tell us which strategy is better on a big screen resolution.

By: Richard Morton

Richard Morton — Tue, 16 Oct 2007 13:41:53 +0000

Fascinating stuff. It would be interesting to know how this is affected by the mathematics behind mouse movement (in other words the algorithms in windows and other OSs that determine how far the mouse pointer moves relative to the mouse, which prevent the need for a mouse mat as big as the physical screen amongst other factors.

By: Elaine

Elaine — Fri, 12 Oct 2007 20:44:13 +0000

Everyone needs a hug…just make sure the person you are approaching is sufficiently large as to acquire the target effectively. ;)

By: Luke

Luke — Wed, 10 Oct 2007 03:35:11 +0000

As a corollary to the point about Fitts’s Law not addressing movement in multiple dimensions or amidst distractions, consider that the notion of a target is relative. Sure you may want the user to click a particular button, but if the layout provides all germane interaction handles in visual clusters, that cluster can become the initial target. During the movement toward the larger target, the user may subdivide and segregate specific target from distraction. By the time they’ve discerned their specific target, the distance that they’ll need to cross is lessened, and they’re already in motion.

No big science here. Just sharing a thought :)