unity-design team mailing list archive

[Ralph Green <sirable@xxxxxxxxx>]

>> screens.   That is certainly not my experience.  ... The
>> question is how typical am I?

  This will probably hurt my case, but I have been thinking about this
part.  Part of the Fitt's Law calculation is also based on the target
size.  The theory is supposed to imply that a target at the edge of
the screen is easier to hit and the target is given a large value.
This theory is based on the assumption that when the mouse gets to the
edge of the screen, it will stop.  This is rarely the case for me, and
maybe I am unusual in that way.  I spend most of my time running
virtual machines or vnc sessions to machines on my network.  The edge
of their screens is somewhere in the middle of the screen on my host
machine.  So, global menus may hurt me much more than a typical user.
  I do this even on an isolated machine.  I like the ability to
checkpoint the filesystem on the virtual machines and isolate any
errors to a VM that I can replace or roll back.
   I am guessing the average user does not do this as much.  I setup
client machines this way fairly often, but I don't remember running
across anyone else who did it on their own.



On 5/21/11, Ralph Green <sirable@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> On 5/19/11, Ed Lin <edlin280@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>> On Thu, May 19, 2011 at 10:03 AM, Ralph Green <sirable@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>>>  2. MPT seems to think the global menu is quicker, even on large
>>> screens.   That is certainly not my experience.  ... The
>>> question is how typical am I?
>>>  3. Why do people keep referring to Fitt's law.  It does not apply to
>>> 2 dimensions, as best as I can tell.  Shouldn't the discussion be
>>> about steering law?
>>> Ralph
>>
>> Fitts's Law is the best measurement we've got for the concrete
>> problem. For what it describes it is absolutely accurate and helpful.
>> However it's only part of the equation and sometimes this is
>> forgotten.
>>
>> A button on the screen edge is faster to access than a button anywhere
>> else on the screen, except directly beneath the mouse pointer. This
>> applies universally to everyone who knows how to use a mouse and uses
>> proper acceleration. If it doesn't for you, "you are doing it wrong",
>> the testing or the mousing ;)
>  If this is some kind of principle that guides the decision to use
> the global menu, then it is time to change.  I am quite experienced
> with the mouse and how to use it.  I use as much acceleration as is
> reasonable.  It would not be an improvement to have the mouse go
> twitching away out of control, which is what happens if I speed it up
> more than it is now.  So, the distance is not irrelevant.  If Fitt's
> Law is considered important, how can the distance be irrelevant?  It
> is one of the variables that most drives the result.  If you ignore
> distance, you are not using Fitt's Law, but rather an arbitrary
> derivation of it.
>  Concerning my query about Fitt's Law, I note this quote from wikipedia:
>  "It applies only to movement in a single dimension and not to
> movement in two dimensions (though it is successfully extended to two
> dimensions in the Accot-Zhai steering law);"
>