Paul Fitts was a psychologist, who was a senior officer in the US Air Force during the war. Or we know where the mouse is, but not the user’s hands. People focus on action objects, so will try to click the icon or text label inside a button, sapping some of the power of the size. Overly large buttons actually are quite hard to use, as they stop being perceived as buttons. There are other factors that come into play. Of course, we all know that a lot of this is not universally true. This infinite depth is doubly true for corners, so those are the easiest to select areas not under the mouse. Menus along the top edge, for example, are easier to click than the same size items just a bit offset. The edges of the screen are “infinitely deep” you can’t miss the edge as the mouse stops when it gets there. The pixel under the mouse pointer or cursor is instantly usable, without movement.Ī larger target is always easier to click than a smaller one.
In touch magazine series#
Then there are a series of terms and exploitable lessons from this. The law as stated is that: “The amount of time required for a person to move a pointer to a target area is a function of the distance to the target divided by the size of the target.” Most interactive designers of any sort will recognize this, and generally know some very small subset of the lessons, by rote. I didn’t want to become a hermit who dies with a never completed fifteen-volume work on a constantly-shifting topic.īut many are worth chatting about independently, and one that you might enjoy is Fitts’ Law, and how it works with touchscreens. When I started writing Touch Design for Mobile Interfaces, I would regularly find an interesting topic or tangent that led far into the weeds, and had to stop myself from pursuing it too far. In this article, Steven Hoober shines the spotlight on Fitts’ Law and explains why we should always ask questions and consider what particular guidelines and lessons mean to our users and our products.
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