Fitts' throughput and the speed-accuracy tradeoff

  • Authors:
  • I. Scott MacKenzie;Poika Isokoski

  • Affiliations:
  • York University, Toronto, ON, Canada;University of Tampere, Tampere, Finland

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
  • Year:
  • 2008

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Abstract

We describe an experiment to test the hypothesis that Fitts' throughput is independent of the speed-accuracy tradeoff. Eighteen participants used a mouse in performing a total of 5,400 target selection trials. Comparing nominal, speed-emphasis, and accuracy-emphasis conditions, significant main effects were found on movement time (ms) and error rate (%), but not on throughput (bits/s). In the latter case, failure to reject the null hypothesis of "no significant difference" (i.e., .05