Fitts' Law is arguably the most important formula in the field of human-computer interaction. It's..
Time = a + b log2 ( D / S + 1 )
.. where D is the distance from the starting point of the cursor, and S is the width of the target. This is all considered on a 2D plane relative to the axis of movement.
Years of experimental results have proven Fitts' law time and time again:
Fitts' law has been shown to apply under a variety of conditions, with many different limbs (hands, feet, head-mounted sights, eye gaze), manipulanda (input devices), physical environments (including underwater!), and user populations (young, old, mentally retarded, and drugged participants). Note that the constants a and b have different values under each of these conditions.
It's not exactly rocket science, as Bruce Tognazzini points out:
The time to acquire a target is a function of the distance to and size of the target.While at first glance, this law might seem patently obvious, it is one of the most ignored principles in design. Fitts' law (properly, but rarely, spelled "Fitts' Law") dictates the Macintosh pull-down menu acquisition should be approximately five times faster than Windows menu acquisition, and this is proven out.
So, to make navigation easier, you either put clickable items closer together, or you make the clickable area bigger. Or both. I know what you're thinking: no duh. But bear with me.
Here's one thing that puzzled me. I hate Windows as much as the next disestablishmentarianist, but how can the menu argument be valid? Are Macintosh pull-down menus really that much larger than Windows pull-down menus?
They aren't significantly larger. But Macintosh menus aren't attached to the application window-- they're always at the top of the screen.
Since the cursor stops at the edge of the screen, for the purposes of Fitts' law calculation, Macintosh menus are infinitely tall! Thus, Macintosh menus are faster to navigate.
Although placing the menus at the top of the display does leverage Fitts' law nicely, it also presents its own set of problems.
Fitts' law isn't just about making things larger and easier to click on. It's about maximizing the utility of the natural borders on the edges of your screen:
Fitts' law indicates that the most quickly accessed targets on any computer display are the four corners of the screen, because of their pinning action, and yet, for years, they seemed to be avoided at all costs by designers.Use the pinning actions of the sides, bottom, top, and corners of your display: A single-row toolbar with tool icons that "bleed" into the edges of the display will be many times faster than a double row of icons with a carefully-applied one-pixel non-clickable edge between the tools and the side of the display.
I've definitely felt the pain of Fitts' law violations.
I love multiple monitors. In my opinion, life begins with two displays, the largest you can afford. And you should really upsize to three if you want maximum benefit. But one unfortunate side-effect of multiple monitors is the removal of some natural edges between adjoining monitors. The cursor now flows freely between monitors; it's painful to stop the cursor on the left and right edges of the app on the center monitor.
And Fitts' law violations can also extend to hardware. Consider touchpad designs that have dedicated scrolling areas on the left or bottom.
This seems like a good idea on paper, but in practice, it destroys the usability of the touchpad. On a touchpad with dedicated scrolling areas, you have no way to know when you've passed from touchpad area into the no-man's-land of scrolling area. The natural edges of the touchpad are ruined; we've given them an arbitrarily different, hard-coded set of functionality. Dedicated hardware isn't even necessary to achieve scrolling effects on a touchpad. We can easily leverage Fitts' Law in the touchpad driver software instead. Just slide your finger until you hit an edge, then slide it along the edge.
The edges could be your most valuable real estate. Use them responsibly. Fitts' law is powerful stuff.
Ethan: That works perfectly. The minimum offset is even the same as what I wanted. I didn't know that they were adjustable when the resolutions are the same. Thanks.
HitScan on August 11, 2006 2:18 AMI forget where I read this, but this so-called law has been proven useless in practice. Users learn within a couple of hours to be precise with the mouse and stop exactly at the right location.
Plus, how exactly important is 'hitting' the main menu? It's not, it is not what the user is clicking the most during the day, the user needs a lot of mouse precision and skills for what he is doing the rest of the time. Most mac users use a small set of keyboard shortcuts for a small set of application global commands, and there are toolbars for things that need to be done quick with one click. Going in the menu is not a one-click action.
Hitting the menu is NOT a complete action in itself. Mac menus may be of "infinit height", but 1) you still need to click on the exact word, which may be only one inch wide (and I do miss the mark quite often on my iBook) 2) you need to hold down the mouse and reverse the direction of the movement and precisly hit the menu item you need. Therefore, selecting a menu item is not a vague gestural action.
As for the Start menu having a small border, it's annoying indeed but a very slight annoyance as, again, you're not suposed to be an hurry to hit it and you're not typically hitting it repeatedly. There is also a big fat Windows key to open the menu and save you some mouse travel.
In otherwords, while it's totally true that there shouldn't be one-pixel dead boarders around the sceen because they are misleading, in terms of speed of access this is often an edge cases optimization.
Hitting the corder and borders of the screen with the mouse is put to good use in a couple of apps, however. For example, on a Discreet Frame/Toxik, hitting the borders switches the screen to another window, like switching virtual desktop. And of course we know that screen savers have used the screen borders
Maybe the scrolling sections of the touch pad could be isolated by subtle ridges.
njkayaker on August 11, 2006 4:04 AMMy start button takes up the whole of the bottom corner - no pixel margins.
I assume you guys complaining about it are using the 'old-style' windows theme.
I like shiny buttons.
Ian Tyrrell on August 11, 2006 4:12 AMIt has always annoyed me that the windows start button is slightly in from the corner. In XP if you click in the corner you can see the cursor jump diagonally on to the start button.
Ok, this is fine. I have two 20" LCD's and have my taskbar 3 rows high. 2 rows for opened programs (I hate grouping) and 1 row for quick lauch. The quick launch is at the bottom and I have about 25 icons in it. Infinitely deep, you might say. But the bloody start button is anchored top-left, instead of bottom-left. I can't slam my mouse into the corner to hit Start...
I like shiny buttons.
No worries, Vista has that big-ass shiny circle of a start menu that takes up the entire left hand corner. It's like Fitts' Law pornography.
I think Windows does a good job utilizing the edge at bottom of the screen with the taskbar (which, by the way, unlike Apple's one-screen menus, can spread across multiple monitors in a logical way) and start menu. I just wish we had more stuff along the top edge!
Jeff Atwood on August 11, 2006 4:34 AMI use key combinations where possible instead of menus :)
WebMonster on August 11, 2006 4:35 AMThe menu bar is always on the same monitor. You can choose what monitor you want it to be on in the Displays part of System Preferences. The dock always locates itself on the same screen as the menubar.
I can only speak to my workflow, but I keep the app(s) I'm working with on the primary display. The secondary display (for I have but a two-display system) holds ancillary apps. I've I have a video playing while working, it'll be on the second screen. If I'm working on a web layout, the browser will be on the second screen. Or I'll have a browser window open with an API reference on the second screen.
Basically, the windows on the second monitor don't get as much interaction as the ones on the primary monitor. But even then, I personally don't use the menus that much anyway. The keyboard equivalents for the important commands in the apps of my core toolset are fairly hardwired into my brain.
But, if I do need to use the menus, I always know exactly where they are. They are consistently and predictably at the top of the main screen. Since I run a two monitor setup with the second display on the right of the primary, the left edge of the primary display is a hard edge. Thus, from anywhere on either screen, I just have to make a quick motion up and to the left with the mouse to fling the pointer onto the menubar. No finesse or aiming required and no chance of overshooting.
Proximity isn't entirely lost, because Mac OS X provides a standard toolbar control that most apps make use of. These are 32x32 icons, so only the most important tasks are represented. But, it is just a toolbar.
One nicety I will point out is that the Apple menu extends all the way to the left edge of the menubar. And the Spotlight menu likewise extends to the right edge, so while it looks like there are 10 pixels of wasted margin, they are actually active areas.
As far as trackpad scrolling, I have to admit that since getting my MacBook, I have become a complete convert to Apple's method. Basically, one finger will move the cursor around and tapping with one finger will left-click. Two fingers will scroll vertically and horizontally, and tapping with two fingers will right-click. No special areas, so no accidentally hitting the wrong part of the pad. It took about two weeks to adjust from the edge of the pad style, but now that I have adjusted, there would be a lot of kicking and screaming if I had to go back.
Nice Jeff, I must be living under a rock, because I did not know about Fitt's law. What do you recommend for reading to gain more experience/knowledge in terms of user interface design?
I have not worked seriously with MacOsX, but I try to save up for a mac. People I know, who work on Mac are mostly not the technical guys and they just use the mouse for navigation in browsers and graphic applications. MacOsX is often said to be more "pretty" then windows, but how useful is it. How is the daily OsX user experience for a software developer?
With windows I don’t like the Start button or actually I don’t like much of the navigation. I just use QuickLaunch, SlickRun and Total Commander. I think it is only with browser navigation I use the mouse. But again I use very few applications.
I haven’t tried Vista, but is it possible to rearrange your applications in the taskbar? The "group by application" was never something I fell for.
In my personal experience the windows UI doesn’t really feel like multitasking, though it has improved a lot. But I never understood why applications should be allowed to take focus from you constantly. Like if I start a application like Photoshop that takes some seconds to load, I click away to some other application, then I don’t think that the application should gain focus before I select it again.
But I guess, user interface is a matter of the users choice.
Peter Palludan on August 11, 2006 5:46 AMI think Ubuntu (and many other flavors of Linux) uses a method similar to OSX for its menus. They are at the top edge, so they have the "infinite height" feature.
For windows, it is hard to take full advantage of Fitts' Law, since you have to override the default user experience and make your own toolbar/menu bar stuff.
I wonder if anyone has a way to move the toolbar out of the app and into it's own space at the top of the screen?
Eric D. Burdo on August 11, 2006 6:12 AMMy feelings is Windows menus has to be more flexible....Provision should be there to make it more customizable and floating..
Sourav on August 11, 2006 6:52 AMI'm also irritated by trying to close things on a multiple monitor setup. I /almost/ went so far as to make a mouse hook that would stop the cursor from crossing monitors at the top inch or so. Then I considered how much experience I have writing low level OS hooks (none) and what could go wrong and decided to pass on it.
HitScan on August 11, 2006 7:21 AMI use key combinations where possible instead of menus
This is interesting because I use the keyboard all the time, and I often use the "corner" of a document or whatever to orient myself. Most MS apps move the text cursor to top left on Ctrl+PgUp, to bottom right on Ctrl+PgDn, etc. I especially (re)orient myself to the "top left" part of a document (or spreadsheet, for that matter). Point being (I think I have one) that the idea of pinning to a fixed point is not just applicable (in my case) to mouse pointers, but as a psychologically for the text cursor as well.
Of course, I could just be completely wrong.
As for mouses, way more often than seems right I miss the thing I'm trying to click on and hit its neighbor. I notice that particularly when trying to click the top row of something (e.g. Outlook display). It's too dang easy to hit the column header instead and wait till sorting is done, and then start over, sigh. More generally, anytime the hit area for two things is very close, it's easy to click the wrong thing. Worst of all is hitting the wrong icon on the Quick Launch toolbar and -- oh, no! -- now you're stuck waiting for MusicMatch (or VS, haha) to finish its interminable startup.
mike on August 11, 2006 7:33 AMPeter:
I think you will find the link to Bruce Tognazzini's article most helpful.
iBut I guess, user interface is a matter of the users choice./i
Yes and no. Fitts' Law is an example of no. It is true, like it or not, know about it or not, used to it or not. Bigger targets are easier to click, and edge-adjacent targets are effectively infinitely big. There are plenty of such truths of interface that extend beyond what the user is used to or favors, and good interface design requires attention to these.
That said, familiarity has a lot to do with comfort and ease of use and users frequently prefer the familiar to the more usable. Design is hard.
Carl Manaster on August 11, 2006 7:43 AMhitscan -- my suggestion is to raise the center/primary monitor, both physically and in the software "arrangement". That creates a little "trap" in the upper left and right corners, where you can use the edge to catch the mouse when you shoot for that close button. As long as you've raised the center monitor physically as well, you mouse will still move from screen to screen smoothly, so it should be intuitive.
(personally, I keep my screens flush and use keyboard shortcuts for closing windows... *shrug*)
I couldn't live with the Mac menus - for my way of thinking menus need to be associated with the objects they apply to. For me, it is like the Mac menu is assuming you only have one thing on the screen at a time (although I presume it is focus sensitive). It just does not feel right from a multi-tasking perspective.
Paul Coddington on August 11, 2006 8:53 AMMy dad and I both have Compaq laptops (they were free; long story) and they have a small ridge separating the scroll bar area from the regular mousing surface; it works pretty well.
Third, I cannot see the menu for the application I want work with unless it is already active. That means moving the cursor all the application, then all the way back to the menu. I cannot imagine doing this on a multi-screen system.
Fitts Law. It takes less time and effort to fling the mouse to the top of the screen and choose a Mac menu than it does to choose a Windows menu. The Windows menu has to be located in the X and Y axes, the Mac menu only has to be located in the X axis, because as Jeff said in the post, Mac menus are infinitely tall.
Except you missed the whole point: to get to the menu, you first have to find and click on the application the menu belongs to, which cuts out a lot of the benefit of having the menu at the top. There's more than Fitts' Law involved in this case.
David on August 11, 2006 9:42 AMMy problem with mac menus is that I never can see them.
First, since they are no where the window I am working with, I don't think of them being related.
Second, I have no way of knowing if the menu applies to the dialog box I am working with or the application as a whole.
Third, I cannot see the menu for the application I want work with unless it is already active. That means moving the cursor all the application, then all the way back to the menu. I cannot imagine doing this on a multi-screen system.
The touchpad is the Spawn of Satan. Thanks for pointing out yet another reason to hate that infernal, cursed "invention".
Nick Hodges on August 11, 2006 10:53 AMWhatever happened to force feedback mice? It sounded like a great idea. When you rolled over an application edge, there was slight resistance bringing physicality to the UI.
Seems to me that the "edge" problem with multi-monitors and applications could be improved by simulating a slight bit of physics (with or without force feedback). When mousing over an app, for example, perhaps the mouse slows down slightly over edges and if you keep moving pops over. Or something similar.
Of course, the only way to know if that would be better is to usability test test test!
Haacked on August 11, 2006 11:34 AMWith WinXP they made the Taskbar effectively infinite height. Too bad the buttons still look like they're offset from the edge, so your brain still thinks "better mouse precisely".
I ran into a really bad violation of Fitt's law the other day. I tried out Cyworld because I'm a sucker for cutesy isometric avatar chats. Check out the pagination in this screenshot: http://www.newshutch.com/blog/wp-content/assets/cyworld.png
First of all they only show you 10 items per page, so you have to remember which "page" the option you liked is on. But the absolute worst is that only the number text of the page is clickable, not the entire page icon. After struggling with this on a trackpad, I gave up.
Why are social networking sites always so poorly designed?
Nathan Bowers on August 11, 2006 12:01 PMWhen mousing over an app, for example, perhaps the mouse slows down slightly over edges and if you keep moving pops over. Or something similar.
Consider WinAmp's "snap to edge" behavior. As you drag the app, if it gets within +- 5px of an edge, it snaps over to that edge automagically.
I think manipulating the user's cursor movement speed would be more of a negative than a positive. If the edges of the screen were like "molasses" you had to punch through with your cursor, that would get annoying fast.
Jeff Atwood on August 11, 2006 12:02 PMalthough I presume [the mac menubar] is focus sensitive
Yes, it is. If you look at the screen shot you will see the word 'TextEdit' in the left side of the MenuBar. That's because TextEdit is the current foreground application. (Much like Windows, the Mac only allows one foreground window and, thus, one foreground application.) If you switch to a different app, the new foreground app's menus will magically replace the old app's menus. This prevents the system from wasting valuable screen real estate displaying the useless menus of background applications. :)
[S]ince they are no where the window I am working with, I don't think of them being related.
That's an adjustment you have to make moving between the systems. It's like Windows having the close box on the 'wrong' end of the title bar. Or driving on the 'wrong' side of the road in England.
Second, I have no way of knowing if the menu applies to the dialog box I am working with or the application as a whole.
Menu Items, and entire menus, that don't apply to the currently front-most window (or even the widget with current focus) are disabled: their name dims and disabled items aren't highlighted when you mouse over them. For example, the Close, Save and Print items in the File menu in the screenshot. Thus, it is very simple to tell at a glance which menus and menu items apply to the current item/window/task/widget/etc.
Third, I cannot see the menu for the application I want work with unless it is already active. That means moving the cursor all the application, then all the way back to the menu. I cannot imagine doing this on a multi-screen system.
Fitts Law. It takes less time and effort to fling the mouse to the top of the screen and choose a Mac menu than it does to choose a Windows menu. The Windows menu has to be located in the X and Y axes, the Mac menu only has to be located in the X axis, because as Jeff said in the post, Mac menus are infinitely tall.
After some computing experience, a user learns to multi-task, and the Mac menus can be really frustrating.
It's been my experience that most novice users become acquainted with keyboard equivalents (Alt-F4, Ctrl-W, etc.) long before they start trying to carry out more than one task at a time. But then I've never taught intro computer courses, so my results are likely biased or skewed.
scott lewis on August 11, 2006 12:07 PMExcept you missed the whole point: to get to the menu, you first have to find and click on the application the menu belongs to, which cuts out a lot of the benefit of having the menu at the top. There's more than Fitts' Law involved in this case.
Okay, but is this an actual workflow we're talking about? Or is it just a hypothetical worst-case scenario? I switch applications with command-tab (alt-tab), not the mouse. I use mainly keyboard shortcuts instead of the menus themselves. Is my heavy use of the keyboard abnormal?
scott lewis on August 12, 2006 4:57 AMExcept you missed the whole point: to get to the menu, you first have to find and click on the application the menu belongs to, which cuts out a lot of the benefit of having the menu at the top. There's more than Fitts' Law involved in this case.
Also, if we apply Fitt's Law to both actions (click the application to bring it forward, choose a menu) we get the following:
Windows: click a large section of the X-Y plane to bring the window forward (fast), click a small section of the X-Y plane to choose he menu (slow).
Mac: click a large section of the X-Y plane to bring the window forward (fast), click a small section of the X plane to choose he menu (fast).
Assume that the menu is visible on the Windows window. Then the Windows actions become: click a small section of the X-Y plane to bring the window forward (slow), click it again to choose the menu (very fast).
The problem is, you throw out the ability to click anywhere on the window to bring it forward in order to not have to aim for the menu once the window is active. You haven't eliminated the slow process of targeting the menu, you've just shifted it over to the activate action.
Now, actual lab test would be required to see if (slow + very fast) (fast + fast) or vice versa. :)
scott lewis on August 12, 2006 5:08 AM [Peter Palludan]
I haven’t tried Vista, but is it possible to rearrange your applications in the taskbar? The "group by application" was never something I fell for.
You can rearrange the order of your applications in the taskbar through this freeware non-open-source program (available in Japanese and English): Taskbar++
a href="http://hp.vector.co.jp/authors/VA013430/program/taskbarpp/main.html"http://hp.vector.co.jp/authors/VA013430/program/taskbarpp/main.html/a
You mouse over the taskbar, hold down Alt, drag the order of the taskbar app buttons, then release the Alt. Then Taskbar++ does a "trick" to rearrange taskbar app buttons.
It works at least on Windows XP Pro, and is mentioned to run on WindowsNT/2000/XP/2003.
[Jeff Atwood]
I just wish we had more stuff along the top edge!
I was going to suggest moving a Taskbar toolbar to the top edge of the screen, but unfortunately the top most pixel of the bar is not active for clicks. Fitts' law broken again!
But really, what can Windows programmers do in light of this Fitts law? Make buttons bigger? Because menus can't be fixed.
piyo on August 12, 2006 8:21 AMVista has that big-ass shiny circle of a start menu that takes up the entire left hand corner
Hooray :)
I agree more stuff along the top would be good - can't you make a new toolbar and put commonly used shortcuts etc up the top too?
Ian Tyrrell on August 12, 2006 1:10 PMMentioned by some other posters — keyboard shortcuts...
I'm no UI designer, and I have no human-computer-interaction training. But I find it terribly inefficient to use a pointing device for everything. Moving between controls using tab and using common keyboard shortcuts is much faster and probably helps with repetitive movement to/from the mouse, not to mention the fine movement to get to the desired button...
(pressing tab all day long isn't so good either though. I'm going to try a foot pedal next, for that)
sak on August 13, 2006 6:35 AMHere's a nice article by Jensen Harris on the same topic
http://blogs.msdn.com/jensenh/archive/2006/08/22/711808.aspx
Jeff Atwood on August 22, 2006 1:54 PMOne interesting and useful feature that seems to help Fitt's Law issues is mouse (touchpad) acceleration - the quicker you move, the further the on-screen icon moves when covering the same distance.
This alters the equations so that things which are far away are "just as close" as stuff nearer - if you move a bit faster when going there.
bryan on January 6, 2007 5:03 AMWindows: click a large section of the X-Y plane to bring the window forward (fast), click a small section of the X-Y plane to choose he menu (slow).
You don't need to bring a Windows app into focus before using it's menus. If you have an application on screen (but without focus), you just click the button you need and it focuses the application and does whatever you clicked in a single operation. Surely it's much slower to work with an OSX multi-monitor setup in which you need to switch application focus to get the menu to appear.
It's nice that OSX uses this infinite space for their menus, but this article seems to ignore that Windows uses the same space for quite a few handy things on a maximized application: the title bar, minimize, restore, close buttons, vertical scrollbars. All of these items on OSX float in mid-air and thus make simple window manipulation so much harder.
apathetic on January 6, 2007 5:43 AMExcellent visual exploration of Fitt's Law
http://particletree.com/features/visualizing-fittss-law/
Jeff Atwood on October 4, 2007 2:10 AMEver tried DejaMenu on Mac OS X?
It will create the frontmost application's menubar as a pop-up menu at the mouse's current location!
http://www.macosxhints.com/article.php?story=20040426064258161query=dejamenu
Bounav on November 5, 2007 6:52 AMTo take better advantage of Fitt's Law, you could do as I do and move the Quick Launch tool bar over to the left edge of screen. You can then slam the cursor left to access the Quick Launch items, plus it frees up space for more task bar icons. Also, with Quick Launch now separate from the task bar, you're free to fill up Quick Launch with many more buttons. I hardly ever use the Start menu anymore because every tool that I run is on the Quick Launch tool bar.
Doug on November 5, 2007 7:02 AM"But one unfortunate side-effect of multiple monitors is the removal of some natural edges between adjoining monitors. The cursor now flows freely between monitors; it's painful to stop the cursor on the left and right edges of the app on the center monitor."
This is why I take advantage of Windows' ability to specify my right monitor is 16-32 pixels lower than my center monitor - it maintains the top-right corner boundry and makes it easy for me to click on the close button for windows. I would love a utility that enforced a 'boundry' among those first couple dozen pixels at the corner of each display, to allow the corners to work properly, but still allow the monitors to line up nicely. (I have seen... interesting effects when playing games at different resolutions than my main desktop res.)
Araemo on November 5, 2007 12:28 PM"Fitts' law indicates that the most quickly accessed targets on any computer display are the four corners of the screen"
Actually, the fastest pixel to click on is the pixel the mouse is already on. Check out the CAD program Liquid PCB (http://www.liquidpcb.org) for a very fast access menu system.
Hugo
Rocketmagnet on February 11, 2008 2:06 AMWhile I am a die hard mac user, I am often frustrated with the dock. When using a program where I have to bring the mouse to the edge of the screen (i.e. photoshop), it is more often than not that another program is accidentally opened.
Windows: click a large section of the X-Y plane to bring the window forward (fast), click a small section of the X-Y plane to choose he menu (slow).
You don't need to bring a Windows app into focus before using it's menus. If you have an application on screen (but without focus), you just click the button you need and it focuses the application and does whatever you clicked in a single operation.
I know this is a discussion of Fitts' law, but I feel that a few important facts are being left out. First, for those of us who only have one monitor, having more than one window occupying the screen is infinitely annoying, meaning that clicking on the window itself isn't an option, regardless of Operating system. Second, while Windows does it better, both OS's have a taskbar (okay, the 'dock'), giving a screen edge to change applications. And third, it is infinitely faster to use alt-tab/command-tab to cycle between applications. In fact, I can't remember the last time I actually clicked to switch apps.
Wyatt on May 19, 2008 12:20 PMWyatt, that's an interesting argument.
First, I only have one monitor, and it annoys me to have only 1 window open/maximized. I like having multiple windows open (e.g., different browser windows for different categories of information, or visual studio nunit - no, I don't want the nunit plugin to muck up my ide, I prefer it being a separate application).
Second/Third - I almost never use alt+tab because it is too slow. It is much faster for me to click on the application in the taskbar. The only exception being if I'm toggling between exactly two application windows often (e.g., copy paste notes into Word when I'm writing a research paper).
KG on May 20, 2008 9:57 AMone so-far unmentioned advantage to the Windows menu system is that Very Often one has to move BACK to the application window after doing something on the menu. By putting the menu bar atn the top (vs. in the same window) this move-back has a much larger distance, and the app window, while large, is not inifite height. More specifically, the pint in the Application Window which needs to be access is potentially quite small - I don't want to go back to the window just anywhere.
So the nifty inifinite-height thing seems ok until you are done with the menu, at which point you have pout the user into a Very Bad state, Fitt's Law-wise
Jozee on June 3, 2008 12:21 PMInteresting read, including the comments. What a variety of working habits people have!
In the long run, habit matters more than theoretical calculations about which set of habits would be best. See the QWERTY keyboard, which is not the most efficient layout, for English or any other language. But we keep it - because we've gotten used to it. Changing our habits for 10-15% increase in speed is pointless at this stage.
IOW, some standard GUI layout and features should be found on any and every OS, and on any and every application. I don't much care what it is, as long as I don't have to relearn mouse and hand gestures every time I use another OS or application.
Well, I do care about one thing: clicking on any object should bring up a context-sensitive menu. And I do like sub-task menus (such a for printing) to open up in nice little panes of their own, which I can move around to where I want them. But I won't insist on that.
For those who want to be different, optional features could be available, either system-wide or for a given application. We have enough hardware to store all this extra stuff, so why not do it. I'm sure there are lots of unemployed computer science students around who would be only too happy to work on the coding. ;-)
Cheers,
Wolf Kirchmeir
Blind River, Ontario
You'll be glad to know that the Start button in Windows 7 is infinitely tall.
Chris J. Breisch on January 20, 2009 10:45 AMThe reason Fitts' Law is ignored is that other aspects of GUI design are more important. I use both a Mac Powerbook and a Windows XP box, and much prefer the Windows design.
wolf k.
Wolf Kirchmeir on January 21, 2009 2:19 AMHi, wat is everyone chattin bout??
Blob-B on May 11, 2009 9:23 AMI know this is already a three-year-old post and no one is likely to agree with me on this, but the correct spelling isn't "Fitts' Law", it's "Fitts's Law". It would be "Fitts' Law" if, say, two brothers with the last name Fitt came up with it. But it is named after only one scientist, named Fitts.
kip on July 16, 2009 11:13 AMI feel your touchpad pain - that is (IMO) (one of) the best features of my iBook/OS X combo - using two fingers to scroll rather than the touchpad edges. The number of times I've tried to scroll with two fingers on a PC since I got the iBook....
Stuart Dootson on February 6, 2010 9:52 PMI'm with Paul on that. I see how a consolidated menu system would be simpler for novice users; it's the same reason Windows added the Start menu. Keep things simple, consistent, and in one place to make it harder to get lost or confused.
After some computing experience, a user learns to multi-task, and the Mac menus can be really frustrating. It's a paradigm shift - like when a child learns that objects which are out of sight still exist. At that time, it no longer makes sense for "the computer" to own the menu, since conceptually they're no longer in a generic "working on the computer" state, they're editing a paper / buying music / sending an e-mail / state. From that point of view, Fitt's law says two different things - from a physical mouse movement point of view, it makes sense to consolidate menus at the top to give them that infinite height. However, from a logical point of view, we've created unnecessary distance between the work area and the control area, so the mental movement is greater.
In the case where we're only working on one thing, we maximixe the application and we've got something pretty close to the Mac interface (although I agree that we don't get that infinite height thing). We've also got the option to multi-task, which is enhanced by being able to see several menu bars at one time.
I've been enjoying using a Wacom tablet as my primary pointing device, largely because it's an absolute pointing device. The start menu is at a fixed point on the tablet, and after a few days of use I can just about click it with my eyes shut. I'm still hoping for ubiquitous touch-screen or pen enabled monitors some day.
Jon Galloway on February 6, 2010 9:52 PM@ Jeff
"I think Windows does a good job utilizing the edge at bottom of the screen with the taskbar (which, by the way, unlike Apple's one-screen menus, can spread across multiple monitors in a logical way) and start menu. I just wish we had more stuff along the top edge!"
Fitts' pornography or not, "Start Menu" = Fail and Windows still fails miserably in regards to usability overall.
1. Because the main menu is on the bottom
People naturally read from top to bottom, left to right (unless you're reading Hebrew or Arabic). Try dragging the taskbar to the top of the screen. After adjusting to it, everything will feel easier and more natural.
2. You always have to mouseover (and wait for the delay) on a link (all programs) just to see the second level of the menu (which is what you really wanted to see 95% of the time anyway). I work REALLY fast when I get into the zone. Every time I hit that 500ms-1sec wall I scream subconsciously.
3. There's no logical categorization of applications. The start menu is at the complete mercy of the individual application developers. Which means that they can(and will) place folders with their companies name, followed by a sub menu with their application. Or, multiple sub menus with irrelevant/useless tools or links to market their website. <sarcasm>Let me tell you, I love whoring out my OS to application marketing</sarcasm> <sigh />.
4. What is an operating system's sole purpose. Serving files and applications right. Then, doesn't it make sense for links to files (My Computer/My Documents) and applications (Start->All Programs) to, not only have the same weight (size, dimensions, relative location), but also to be sufficiently large enough to make it easiest to click them with the mouse?
That's why docks kick a**. Note: not to be confused with docking
<NSFW>http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=docking </NSFW> (sorry, couldn't resist >:P). Not only does it live on the edge of the screen (usually bottom or left depending on user preference). Icons you mouseover grow in size raising their weight(relevance) in importance(the app you want to use) and making it absolutely obvious which application you're going to open.
I could go on for hours about the shortcomings of the Window's UI (the "My" prefix <sigh />, etc...) because I've spent countless hours hacking it into something more friendly to my workflows. Don't get me wrong, I love working in windows. I just hate the shell's UI.
To avoid making this post any longer. Here's a screenshot of my current *nix layout to illustrate.
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/425505/Screenshot-1.png
I've heard this argument before, but unfortunately, it's not true. I'm not saying that empirically, Mac users aren't faster at using the menubar than Windows users-- I don't know, I haven't tested them. But the large differences you speak of would not be accounted for by Fitts' Law.
See, Fitts' Law is inherently designed to account for movement in 1-dimension. That doesn't stop people from applying this law to movement in 2 dimensions, even though the law only allows for one "width" parameter.
How can they do that? Well, there are a variety of ways, several of which are outlined in MacKenzie & Buxton's influential paper "Extending Fitts' Law..." What they found, comparing several different methods, is that the law is most accurate when using the _smaller_ of the two sides of a rectangle as the width parameter in Fitts law. Thus, while one dimension of the target (menubar) is effectively infinite in width, the other is actually quite small.
While there may be differences in pointing time by making the larger side ever larger, these differences are not accounted for in formulations of Fitts' Law, and in general the RT differences are not nearly as dramatic as those described here.
Jeff Zemla on September 8, 2010 2:12 PMThe comments to this entry are closed.
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