> I personally think the HIG guideline against moving the cursor should > NOT be accepted at face value: if it makes sense to you in your > design, do it and see how it turns out.
It's enough to give one Fitts (sorry to perpetuate one of the most tired puns in the usability word). :) Fitts' Law says that the time to acquire a target with the mouse is a function of the distance to and size of the control, with extra consideration given to the natural "backstop" provided by the monitor boundaries. But none of the readings I could find on Fitts' Law discusses the fourth factor described here: the time it takes the user to discover what happened to their pointer. The aim of moving the pointer away from where the user placed it is to shorten Fitts' first factor (distance), which by itself makes rational sense. But given that this occurs in a context in which all other applications and the OS itself regard the user's placement of the pointer as sacred, the user's expectations may require re-learning how to use (or in this case not use) the pointer. All of the HIGs include "The user is in control" as a core principle, and with such a pervasive convention of leaving the pointer's location to the user it may not be a mistake to consider the pointer as "belonging" to the user. Without a good testing lab and some time on our hands we can't know if this is a benefit or a detriment. Admittedly conservative on such things, before diving into uncharted waters I'd want to at least make sure the areas of known improvement are covered: - Could the size of the controls be made larger? - Does the workflow of the form follow the reading order order of the target audience (left-to-right, top-to-bottom for Western users)? - Can the form be traversed entirely from the keyboard? This latter consideration is a cornerstone of the Win HIG, and given the difficulty of moving from mouse to keyboard and back again may yield the most significant improvement if not already covered. More on Fitts' Law: A Quiz Designed to Give You Fitts <http://www.asktog.com/columns/022DesignedToGiveFitts.html> KDE User Interface Guidelines: Fitts' Law <http://developer.kde.org/documentation/design/ui/fittslaw.html> More at Google: <http://www.google.com/search?q=fitts%27+law> If you find research on the affect of changing pointer location from the user I'd love to read it. Frankly I was surprised I could find nothing on it. -- Richard Gaskin Fourth World Media Corporation Developer of WebMerge 2.1: Publish any database on any site ___________________________________________________________ [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.FourthWorld.com Tel: 323-225-3717 AIM: FourthWorldInc _______________________________________________ use-revolution mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://lists.runrev.com/mailman/listinfo/use-revolution
