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Snap-and-go: helping users align objects without the modality of traditional snapping

Published: 02 April 2005 Publication History

Abstract

Snapping is a widely used technique that helps users position graphical objects precisely, e.g., to align them with a grid or other graphical objects. Unfortunately, whenever users want to position a dragged object close to such an aligned location, they first need to deactivate snapping. We propose snap-and-go, a snapping technique that overcomes this limitation. By merely stopping dragged objects at aligned positions, rather than "warping" them there, snap-and-go helps users align objects, yet still allows placing dragged objects anywhere else. While this approach of inserting additional motor space renders snap-and-go slightly slower than traditional snapping, snap-and-go simplifies the user interface by eliminating the need for a deactivation option and thereby allows introducing snapping to application scenarios where traditional snapping is inapplicable. In our user studies, participants were able to align objects up to 138% (1D) and 231% (2D) faster with snap-and-go than without and snap-and-go proved robust against the presence of distracting snap targets.

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  • (2022)A Fast and Accurate Spatial Target Snapping Method for 3D Scene Modeling and Mapping in Mobile Augmented RealityISPRS International Journal of Geo-Information10.3390/ijgi1101006911:1(69)Online publication date: 17-Jan-2022
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    cover image ACM Conferences
    CHI '05: Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
    April 2005
    928 pages
    ISBN:1581139985
    DOI:10.1145/1054972
    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: 02 April 2005

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    Author Tags

    1. alignment
    2. mouse input
    3. pseudo haptics
    4. snap-dragging
    5. snapping

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    CHI '05 Paper Acceptance Rate 93 of 372 submissions, 25%;
    Overall Acceptance Rate 6,199 of 26,314 submissions, 24%

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    View all
    • (2024)Snapper: Accelerating Bounding Box Annotation in Object Detection Tasks with Find-and-Snap ToolingProceedings of the 29th International Conference on Intelligent User Interfaces10.1145/3640543.3645162(471-488)Online publication date: 18-Mar-2024
    • (2024)GTLayout: Learning General Trees for Structured Grid Layout GenerationComputational Visual Media10.1007/978-981-97-2092-7_7(131-153)Online publication date: 30-Mar-2024
    • (2022)A Fast and Accurate Spatial Target Snapping Method for 3D Scene Modeling and Mapping in Mobile Augmented RealityISPRS International Journal of Geo-Information10.3390/ijgi1101006911:1(69)Online publication date: 17-Jan-2022
    • (2022)Hierarchical Layout Blending with Recursive Optimal CorrespondenceACM Transactions on Graphics10.1145/3550454.355544641:6(1-15)Online publication date: 30-Nov-2022
    • (2022)Voice Snapping: Inclusive Speech Interaction Techniques for Creative Object ManipulationProceedings of the 2022 ACM Designing Interactive Systems Conference10.1145/3532106.3533452(1486-1496)Online publication date: 13-Jun-2022
    • (2020)An infinite-resolution grid snapping technique based on fuzzy theoryApplied Soft Computing10.1016/j.asoc.2020.10611289:COnline publication date: 1-Jul-2020
    • (2019)Improving Pointing in Graphical User Interfaces for People With Motor Impairments Through Ability-Based DesignHuman Performance Technology10.4018/978-1-5225-8356-1.ch059(1193-1243)Online publication date: 2019
    • (2019)Touchy : A Visual Approach for Simulating Haptic Effects on TouchscreensFrontiers in ICT10.3389/fict.2019.000016Online publication date: 13-Feb-2019
    • (2019)Usability Impact of Occlusion-free Techniques on Commonly-used Multitouch ActionsProceedings of the 5th International ACM In-Cooperation HCI and UX Conference10.1145/3328243.3328256(96-105)Online publication date: 1-Apr-2019
    • (2019)Global Beautification of 2D and 3D Layouts with Interactive Ambiguity ResolutionIEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics10.1109/TVCG.2019.2954321(1-1)Online publication date: 2019
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