Crossing-based interfaces

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Crossing-based interfaces are graphical user interfaces that use crossing gestures instead of, or in complement to, pointing.

Contents

[edit] Goal-Crossing Tasks

A pointing task involves moving a cursor inside a graphical object and pressing a button, whereas a goal-crossing task involves moving a cursor beyond a boundary of a targeted graphical object.

Goal crossing has been little investigated, despite sometimes being used on today's interfaces (e.g., mouse-over effects, hierarchical menus navigation, auto-retractable taskbars and hot corners). Still, several advantages of crossing over pointing have been identified:

  • Elongated objects such as hyperlinks are faster to cross than to point.
  • Several objects can be crossed at the same time within the same gesture.
  • Crossing allows triggering actions when buttons are not available (e.g., while an object is being dragged).
  • Crossing-based widgets can be designed to be more compact than pointing-based ones. This may be useful for small display devices.
  • Goal crossing is particularly natural on stylus-based devices. On these devices, crossing an object back and forth is easier than double-clicking.
  • Crossing can be a good alternative for users who have difficulties with clicking or double-clicking.

There are several other ways of triggering actions in user interfaces, either graphic (gestures) and non-graphic (keyboard shortcuts, speech commands).

[edit] Laws of Crossing

Variants of Fitts' law have been described for goal-crossing tasks (Accot and Zhai 2002).

[edit] References

  • Original work
    • Accot, J. and Zhai, S. (2002). More than dotting the i's - foundations for crossing-based interfaces, in Proc. of CHI'2002: ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, Minneapolis, Minnesota, April 2002. pp 73-80.
  • Selected subsequent work
    • Apitz, G. and Guimbretière F. (2004). CrossY: a crossing-based drawing application. In Proceedings of the 17th Annual ACM Symposium on User interface Software and Technology (Santa Fe, NM, USA, October 24 - 27, 2004). UIST '04. ACM Press, New York, NY, 3-12.
    • Dragicevic, P. (2004). Combining crossing-based and paper-based interaction paradigms for dragging and dropping between overlapping windows. In Proceedings of the 17th Annual ACM Symposium on User interface Software and Technology (Santa Fe, NM, USA, October 24 - 27, 2004). UIST '04. ACM Press, New York, NY, 193-196.

[edit] See also

  • Fitts Law — A principle of human movement which predicts the time required to move from a starting position to a final target area.
  • Accot-Zhai steering law — An extension of Fitt's law to steering tasks.

[edit] External links