Cursor relocation techniques to help older adults find 'lost' cursors

Authors:
Nic Hollinworth;Faustina Hwang
Affiliations:
University of Reading, Reading, United Kingdom;University of Reading, Reading, United Kingdom
Venue:
Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
Year:
2011

Citing 7
Cited 1

Touch-sensing input devices

Proceedings of the SIGCHI conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
Combining head tracking and mouse input for a GUI on multiple monitors

CHI '05 Extended Abstracts on Human Factors in Computing Systems
Effects of tiled high-resolution display on basic visualization and navigation tasks

CHI '05 Extended Abstracts on Human Factors in Computing Systems
Multi-monitor mouse

CHI '05 Extended Abstracts on Human Factors in Computing Systems
The Large-Display User Experience

IEEE Computer Graphics and Applications
Studying Point-Select-Drag Interaction Techniques for Older People with Cognitive Impairment

UAHCI '09 Proceedings of the 5th International Conference on Universal Access in Human-Computer Interaction. Addressing Diversity. Part I: Held as Part of HCI International 2009
Helping older adults locate 'lost' cursors using FieldMouse

Proceedings of the 12th international ACM SIGACCESS conference on Computers and accessibility

Effects of Target Expansion on Selection Performance in Older Computer Users

ACM Transactions on Accessible Computing (TACCESS)

Quantified Score

Hi-index	0.01

Visualization

Abstract

Older adult computer users often lose track of the mouse cursor and so resort to methods such as mouse shaking or searching the screen to find the cursor again. Hence, this paper describes how a standard optical mouse was modified to include a touch sensor, activated by releasing and touching the mouse, which automatically centers the mouse cursor to the screen, potentially making it easier to find a 'lost' cursor. Six older adult computer users and six younger computer users were asked to compare the touch sensitive mouse with cursor centering with two alternative techniques for locating the mouse cursor: manually shaking the mouse and using the Windows sonar facility. The time taken to click on a target following a distractor task was recorded, and results show that centering the mouse was the fastest to use, with a 35% improvement over shaking the mouse. Five out of six older participants ranked the touch sensitive mouse with cursor centering as the easiest to use.