Paper Reading #15: Enhanced Area Cursors

Comments:

Shena Hoffmann

Steven Hennessy

Reference Information:

Title: Enhanced Area Cursors: Reducing Fine Pointing Demands for People with Motor Impairments

Authors: L. Findlater, A. Jansen. K. Shinohara, M. Dixon, P. Kamb, J. Rakita, J.O. Wobbrock.

Presentation: UIST '10, October 3-6, 20010, New York, New York.

Summary: This paper describes the development of four different enhanced area cursors that can alleviate some of the challenges faced by computer users with motor impairments.  In order to click with a pointing mouse, there are two phases needed: the ballistic phase and a corrective phase. The corrective phase of pointing is the one that represents more problems for motor impaired users, precision and control are very important. Their main concern was to develop something that would help users with small targets in reduced spaces.

The four enhanced area cursors developed are as follows:

• Click-and-Cross: the users moves a circular area cursor over the area where the desired target is located. Once the the circular area is in place, the user activates it with a click. In order to make their selection the user needs to cross the cursor through the area selected for the small target. 
• Cross-and-Cross: the user moves the area cursors to the desired location, then by crossing the red trigger act the area is activated. Then, to select the desired target, the user needs to cross the target area, just as it is done in the Click-and-Cross.
• Motor-Magnifier: the user moves the area cursor to the desired location and clicks once. Then, a Bubble cursor appears, and the user must select the target by pointing and clicking.
• Visual-Motor-Magnifier: the user moves the cursor to the desired area and clicks once. Then,  the area is magnified visually as well as motor magnification like in Motor-Magnifier. A Bubble cursor is used once again, and the user must select and click.

Two enhanced area cursors. Click-and-Cross: an area
cursor (top-left) transforms covered targets into crossing arcs (topright).
Visual-Motor-Magnifier: an area cursor (bottom-left) expands
visual and motor space for point-and-click selection (bottom-right)

There were two other designs that were abandoned. Even though the developers believed they were promising designs, informal evaluation demonstrated differently. In both of these designs, Ballistic Square and Scanning Area Cursor, the selection process was longer. In the first one the user must decrease the selection area manually, while in the second one the cursor would iterate through all the targets found inside the area cursor, and the user would select when the desired target was highlighted. 

They evaluated their designs with a user study involving both, motor impaired users as well as able-bodied participants. Even though they were focusing on how these cursors would aid motor impaired users, they information they collected from able-bodied participants was helpful for comparison purposes. They presented participants with a testing environment where they were given many distracting targets (grey) and one desired target (green). All the testing scenarios were presented randomly to the participants, and they tested the four enhanced cursors.

They concluded that the Visual-Motor-Magnifier and the Click-Cross cursors were the most successful of the four. They successfully eased the selection process for small, dense targets and reduced the corrective phase challenges the user faced.

Discussion: I really enjoyed reading about this research area. It is really important to develop technology for all people, and design it to fulfill the needs of those who are in physical disadvantage as well. 

I don't think they specified how easy or what the process was to use these cursors in real applications. They mentioned some testing in Microsoft Word and a website, but I wonder how difficult would it be to implement it.