Fitts' law

Also found in: Dictionary, Thesaurus, Legal.

Fitts' law

"The time required to reach a target is based on the distance from the starting point and the size of the target." Coined by Paul Fitts in the 1950s, the law is applied to the location and size of menus and buttons in software. For example, a large button is faster to reach than a small one, and the edges of the screen provide natural stops. Many users prefer the Mac's user interface, because all menus display at the top of the screen. Others prefer Windows, because many commonly used buttons can be made much larger. See laws.

Mentioned in ?

laws

References in periodicals archive ?

Both command sources followed a Fitts' Law model of performance, though the smallest targets deviate slightly from this model (Figure 5).

Fitts' Law in two dimensions with hand and head movements.

Case study: head orientation and neck electromyography for cursor control in persons with high cervical tetraplegia

There were multiple experiments with Fitts' law, when it was adapted to different Human Computer Interaction (HCI) devices [16]-[22].

To get the task execution time we can divide certain task into small steps and with the help of Fitts' law to calculate how long it will take for the user to get from one place in the UI to another (by seeing it or by reaching it with some other HCI device).

Electroencephalography and eye gaze movement signals' usage for estimation of user interface usability

These results are not consistent with the prediction that would be made by Fitts' law (1954) alone, because the top button is farther away than the lower and middle buttons; however, such inconsistencies are not unexpected (e.g., see Welford, 1976, for a review).

Touch a screen or turn a knob: choosing the best device for the job

Evaluation of Shoulder Position Transducers by Fitts' Law

Design and evaluation of prosthetic shoulder controller

Fitts' law and its modified versions (e.g., separating the target distance and width as two individual terms) have successfully characterized target acquisition performance in the physical world and in 2-D human-computer interfaces (see MacKenzie, 1992, for a review/and have also been shown to hold across a wide range of body movements and tasks (e.g., Andres & Hartung, 1989; Crossman & Goodeve, 1965/1983; Drury, 1975; Jagacinski & Monk, 1985: Kerr, 1978; Langolf, Chaffin, & Foulke, 1976).

Characterizing the effects of droplines on target acquisition performance on a 3-D perspective display

For example, as predicted by Fitts' law, one can decrease the time required to select a Web browser's controls by making the controls larger.

Factors affecting the usefulness of impenetrable interface element borders

For human-computer interaction (HCI) design, Fitts' law provides a practical method for comparing the performance of two pointing devices during identical targeting-type tasks, specifically the point-and-click operation (Douglas, Kirkpatrick, & MacKenzie, 1999).

Haptic Force-Feedback Devices for the Office Computer: Performance and Musculoskeletal Loading Issues

Fitts' law has been widely used to predict movement times between a starting point and a finishing point in the presence of lags (Fitts & Peterson, 1964).

Target-Directed Head Movements in a Head-Coupled Virtual Environment: Predicting the Effects of Lags Using Fitts' Law

Results did not show a strong linear Fitts' law relationship, especially at high difficulties.

Effects of variation in system responsiveness on user performance in virtual environments

Their study used a helmet-mounted sight as a computer input device and found Fitts' law to adequately describe head movement.

A comparison of two control-display gain measures for head-controlled computer input devices