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PointAssist: helping four year olds point with ease

Published: 11 June 2008 Publication History

Abstract

Children's difficulty in point-and-click tasks using indirect pointing devices such as the mouse has been documented in several studies. This difficulty is manifested in a lack of control near the target, which often results in children clicking inaccurately. This paper presents and evaluates PointAssist, a tool that helps children in pointing tasks by detecting the type of motion that occurs when children have difficulty pointing at a target, and triggering a precision mode that slows the speed of the mouse cursor in those cases. We conducted a study with 30 four year old participants who completed point-and-click tasks with and without PointAssist. PointAssist provided participants with significant advantages in terms of click accuracy, enabling them to be as accurate as 18 to 22 year olds in a previous study with a very similar setup.

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cover image ACM Other conferences
IDC '08: Proceedings of the 7th international conference on Interaction design and children
June 2008
289 pages
ISBN:9781595939944
DOI:10.1145/1463689
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Published: 11 June 2008

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Author Tags

  1. algorithm
  2. children
  3. human-computer interaction
  4. mouse
  5. pointing tasks
  6. sub-movements

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IDC08

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Overall Acceptance Rate 172 of 578 submissions, 30%

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  • (2018)Using Co-Design to Examine How Children Conceptualize Intelligent InterfacesProceedings of the 2018 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/3173574.3174149(1-14)Online publication date: 21-Apr-2018
  • (2018)Teaching Real-World Categories Using Touchscreen Equivalence-Based InstructionThe Psychological Record10.1007/s40732-018-0277-068:1(89-101)Online publication date: 8-Mar-2018
  • (2017)Tablets, tabletops, and smartphones: cross-platform comparisons of children’s touchscreen interactionsProceedings of the 19th ACM International Conference on Multimodal Interaction10.1145/3136755.3136762(5-14)Online publication date: 3-Nov-2017
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  • (2017)Effects of cursor freeze time on the performance of older adult users on mouse-related tasksApplied Ergonomics10.1016/j.apergo.2017.06.01465(175-182)Online publication date: Nov-2017
  • (2016)Expansion cursorProceedings of the 28th Australian Conference on Computer-Human Interaction10.1145/3010915.3010942(81-90)Online publication date: 29-Nov-2016
  • (2015)Look, My Baby Is Using an iPad! An Analysis of YouTube Videos of Infants and Toddlers Using TabletsProceedings of the 33rd Annual ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/2702123.2702266(1915-1924)Online publication date: 18-Apr-2015
  • (2014)Improving Pointing in Graphical User Interfaces for People with Motor Impairments Through Ability-Based DesignAssistive Technologies and Computer Access for Motor Disabilities10.4018/978-1-4666-4438-0.ch008(206-253)Online publication date: 2014
  • (2014)Input/Output Devices and Interaction TechniquesComputing Handbook, Third Edition10.1201/b16812-25(1-54)Online publication date: 8-May-2014
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