Hello there Scopely/Boundless,
Your recent update regarding orb openings is making Paul Fitts turn into its grave. It also makes me, who knows quite a bit about UX/UI want to pull my hair off everytime I open orbs now.
The Fitt's law in mobile UI design is simple and goes something like this... the thumb (in this case) shouldn't have to travel the screen at 3 different locations, separated by timed animations, simply to accomplish one single simple repetitive task.
This is what we have now..
- Thumb travels from the right side of the screen to the "open multiple orbs" button.
- Thumbs travels back to the right hand side to the "skip this animation we've seen a million times button".
- Thumb travels back to the center of the screen to claim the orb's content.
That's 3 clics using 3 movements of various travel times simply to open orbs. We used to be able to do it in 2 clics, with basically one movement of the thumb, using muscle memory we're extremely used to.
It doesn't look like much, but with the number of orbs we open each day, this little extra travel back and forth of the thumb is absolutely annoying. Especially if you consider the number of orbs we have to open in a week, a month, a year... There is a reason why this is a super important law to consider when creating UI to maximize user experience.
Please consider reverting this change back to what it was. Having the option to open multiple orbs at once was working just fine for months and months. This new design is 5 steps back and there is a lot of room to polish the UX here. Make the operation of opening orbs simple, please! It shouldn't feel like you're trying to play ping pong for such a basic operation.
At some point the Steam UI was changed such that the "close window" X in the top right corner of a maximized Steam window does not extend all the way to the edge of the screen, thus violating an ancient but incredibly crucial UI best practice. Why? Who? How does this happen?
I have recently started a blog on medium. I have written an article on fitt law. Please give some reviews on it. It will really help me a lot. Link for the blog Fitt law
As the main Latte developer I get lately requests in order to support floating docks/panels like the following:
Even though I am not really interested implementing it I would like at least to know how these floating windows behave.
A. Do they follow Fitt's Law concerning the screen edge? So when the mouse reaches at the farest of the screen edge, the applet/task that is above that point does it look hovered and can be activated from the user OR any mouse action in the gap between the dock and the screen edge is forwarded to desktop underground?
B. If the dock/panel is hidden when the mouse reaches the screen edge the dock/panel slides-in OR for these docks/panels do not support any hiding mode?
There’s a TLDR at the bottom :)
I'm not conceited enough to think this is the “best" app layout, but it's a good starting point, and I have reasons for why. If you come up with something else, I’d love to hear it.
I don’t have fat fingers, but I found myself tapping the wrong app constantly. I was being mindful, too, and still was hitting the app adjacent at least one out of every five taps.
I first came up with a pretty good strategy by just centering the app I wanted and zooming in with the digital crown. It works well, but adds time to your interaction because centering takes time, switching to the crown takes time, and zooming in takes more time than tapping.
Granted, it’s not a lot of time, but even fractions of a second add up over the years. And that’s pretty much the idea behind Fitts’s Law. Or, at least, how my brain has understood Fitts's Law.
For those that don’t know it, Fitts's Law is the basic proposal that time spent is relative to the size of the target and the distance you have to travel to get there. The bigger the tap target (app icon size) and the closer to where you already are, the less time wasted. You wouldn’t, for example, put your most used apps on the second page of the iPhone home screen. You’d put it near the bottom of the front page, closest to your thumb.
In just the simplest terms possible, say that your most used apps get 10 interactions a day (for Messages, I’m easily at fifty interactions). Let’s say you could shave off one second from each interaction by making the tap target bigger and the distance to reach the target shorter. Ten seconds per day per target is about an hour per year.
For the Apple Watch, the best way to shorten interaction time on the app screen is give yourself more space for error. You can effectively make the target bigger with empty spaces surrounding an app. So, if your finger isn’t accurate, it’s hitting the app you want and the empty space next to it, not another app.
Here it is, the “best” Apple Watch app layout:
http://imgur.com/aucBCmp
Every six apps form a circle, and every circle has an empty space inside it. Once you get used to aiming for the app you want but on the side that’s facing the space, you’ll pretty much eliminate most accidental taps.
The circles also make for the shortest distances to travel to get to apps. You could create a layout that’s just one long line, but then you’re adding distance from the center.
I chose to surround the watch app instead of startin
... keep reading on reddit ➡Dear Redditors,
We are students from the University of Utrecht and we are conducting an experiment and we need your help! Our experiment is about Fitt's Law (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fitts%27s_law). In this experiment we want to test if gaming a certain amount of hours per week has a significant impact on the time it takes to move a pointer from point A to point B.
You can do this experiment on any device of your choosing. Here is a link to our questionnaire (there is a link to the experiment inside this questionnaire): https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSfHc0OIVkaUDf7bRtsIYER7quYNbRkIsqL8FNwvxiHCwOBecg/viewform?usp=sf_link .
If there are any questions please let is know! Thanks in advance for helping us out.
Browsing YouTube, I stumbled upon an interesting video on Computerphile concerning Fitt's Law which is a mathematical equation that determines how long it takes someone to move something from one location to another. The video specifically looks at how this equation can be used to determine how long long it takes us to move the mouse cursor to click on specific buttons or elements in our user interfaces.
The conclusions are not too surprising but the concept that we can have essentially infinite sized buttons struck me as interesting and worthy of discussion. I can imagine adding code to limit the mouse within certain interfaces to create much faster interaction using the concept of these infinitely sized buttons. Imagine a radial menu system where we can't move the mouse beyond the edges of the menu and therefore we create these infinite sized buttons.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E3gS9tjACwU
I hope this is the right subreddit for my questions. Otherwise, I would be happy to be pointed towards a better place to ask my question:
I am currently working on my thesis for my master's degree and am working through the literature regarding Fitt's law. What I noticed so far is that Fitt's law gets formulated in many different ways and although referencing to other papers not in a consistent way. Does anyone have an idea what is the reason for it? Maybe I am lacking a good foundation regarding logarithmic functions:
MT = a + b log2(2A / W ) (e.g. MacKenzie, 1989: http://www.yorku.ca/mack/JMB89.html)
with ID = log2(2A / W) as the Index of difficulty.
When looking at the original paper of Fitt (Fitts, 1954) the Index of difficulty is formulated as:
ID = **-**log2(W/2A) bits/response
and I can't find any mentioning regarding the movement time (MT) in the original paper. As far as I can see Fitt didn't apply linear regression to his model.
Furthermore, I found an article of Murate and Iwase (2001) which references MacKenzie (1989) stating Fitt's model as:
MT = a + b log2(d/s + 1.0) probably referring to equation (8) of MacKenzie (1989) while still differing from it:
MT = a + b log2( (A / W ) + 0.5)
Literature:
McKenzie(1989): http://www.yorku.ca/mack/JMB89.html
Fitts, P. M. (1954). The information capacity of the human motor system in controlling the amplitude of movement. Journal of Experimental Psychology, 47, 381-391.
Murata, A. & Iwase, H. (2001). Extending Fitt's law to a three-dimensional pointing task. Human Movement Science, 20, 791-805.
More information: ^^^^^.
As if it wasn't fun enough hammering grub into booting both Ubuntu and Windows 7 without throwing errors about cylinders. Please tell me there's a fix for this that isn't "reinstall 9.10" or "force Human to look like Clearlooks."
I know Canonical's not exactly courting Windows converts with their new OS X button order, but this is just needless hostility.
see here if you don't know what Fitts's law is https://www.youtube.com/watch?t=14&v=E3gS9tjACwU
Does this give some credit to the stretching your resolution to make the heads bigger?
Dear Redditors,
We are students from the University of Utrecht and we are conducting an experiment and we need your help! Our experiment is about Fitt's Law (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fitts%27s_law). In this experiment we want to test if gaming a certain amount of hours per week has a significant impact on the time it takes to move a pointer from point A to point B.
You can do this experiment on any device of your choosing. Here is a link to our questionnaire (there is a link to the experiment inside this questionnaire): https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSfHc0OIVkaUDf7bRtsIYER7quYNbRkIsqL8FNwvxiHCwOBecg/viewform?usp=sf_link .
If there are any questions please let is know! Thanks in advance for helping us out.
