March 2000
Intermediate to advanced
256 pages
6h 43m
English
Content preview from Humane Interface, The: New Directions for Designing Interactive SystemsBecome an O’Reilly member and get unlimited access to this title plus top books and audiobooks from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers, thousands of courses curated by job role, 150+ live events each month,
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4-4. Fitts' Law and Hick's Law
It behooves us to place the foundations of knowledge in mathematics.
—Roger Bacon, Opus Majus (13th century)
Various quantitative laws relating to interface design have sound cognetic underpinnings and have been validated repeatedly. These laws often give you additional data on which you can base interface-design decisions. Fitts' law quantifies the fact that the farther a target is from your current cursor position or the smaller the target is, the longer it will take you to move the cursor to the target. Hick's law quantifies the observation that the more choices of a given kind you have, the longer it takes you to come to a decision.
4-4-1. Fitts' Law
Consider that you are moving a cursor toward an on-screen ...