Disentangling relative from absolute amplitude in Fitts' law experiments

Authors:
Yves Guiard
Affiliations:
CNRS & Universitéé de la Méditerranée - France
Venue:
CHI '01 Extended Abstracts on Human Factors in Computing Systems
Year:
2001

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Abstract

Target distance (D) and target width (W), traditionally treated as independent variables in Fitts' target acquisition paradigm, are shown to suffer inextricable confounds with task difficulty. Through a simple geometrical analogy, it is shown that relative movement amplitude D/W(which determines difficulty) and absolute movement amplitude D (or scale) are the only two variables that can be manipulated independently in a Fitts' task experiment. Disentangling relative amplitude from absolute amplitude with an appropriate experimental design should help to study target acquisition in graphical user interfaces.