Talk:Fitts's law

message: I hardly think that Mac/Win wars are the stuff of NPOV, perhaps Talk is a better place.
I might point out the following about the allegation that "the Mac menu bar is always at the top of the screen whereas the Windows menu bar is not":
* With the advent of larger and larger screens, a menu at the top of the screen becomes further and further away from the application itself (of course, many Mac users are stuck with their tiny screens and so don't suffer too much from this) --PS4FA
: (Are you implying that Mac users have smaller screens than Win users? -- Noah Slater) —Preceding unsigned comment added by 81.154.85.208 (talk) 04:54, 29 August 2007
* Should you really want to do so, it is entirely possible to write a Windows app with the menu bar at the top - that's not actually a fundamental feature of Windows itself --PS4FA
: (Yes, but practically no app does at the moment so the comment is still valid. -- Noah Slater) —Preceding unsigned comment added by 81.154.85.208 (talk) 04:54, 29 August 2007
* To reduce the need for using the menu bar, Windows applications generally provide a right-click context menu that immediately appears exactly where the mouse pointer is and thus is very time efficient. The Mac also has a context menu capability, but it requires either holding down a key whilst clicking, which requires both hands, or a click and hold, which wastes time. --PS4FA
: (This is totally beside the point as a) the context menu doesn't do everything the top menu bar does and b) this isn't an argument saying Macs are better overall, it's saying the Mac menu bar is better than the Win menu bar. -- Noah Slater) —Preceding unsigned comment added by 81.154.85.208 (talk) 04:54, 29 August 2007
: No, the Mac method (ctrl-click or cmd-click) is superior because most of the user's time should be with one hand on the mouse and the other on the keyboard, when navigating, working, or playing.   Moreover, the menu shortcuts in Windows are clumsy and redundant, whereas in MacOS they're almost immediate. lysdexia 09:19, 25 Oct 2004 (UTC)
replies: text: Are you saying it requires the use of your entire mouse hand to click one button? Are you wearing mittens? I figure, I have several individually articulated digits on that hand; they might as well be doing something useful. -- Wapcaplet 19:05, 25 Oct 2004 (UTC)
thread_title:  Mac / Windows wars 

message: Unrelated to the above, is anyone else bothered by the addition of periods following the math markup? To me they are a little distracting. -- Wapcaplet 19:06, 25 Oct 2004 (UTC)
replies: text: Yes, I don't really like the use of punctuation within math equations just for the sake of making sentences grammatical.  I also think it's non-standard; I can't remember seeing any math textbooks that use punctuation like the periods and commans that have been added in the article. MichaelMcGuffin 16:14, 9 Nov 2004 (UTC)
thread_title:  Markup changes 

message: The list in the section "Success and implications of Fitts' law" that begins with "If, as generally claimed, the law does hold true for pointing with the mouse, some consequences for user-interface design include:" seems like original research (WP:NOR). For example, the claim that pie menus are faster because of some Fitt's law principles might be mitigated by other factors like reading lists in a circle is slower than reading lists up and down. (I actually like pie menus so I'm happy to think they are.) Are there any sources for any of the information in this section? --Ishi Gustaedr 16:42, 9 May 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  Success and implications 

message: "The Shannon form has the advantage that the ID is always non-negative"
The derivation given in the following section, without the +1, would be strictly non-negative too if the equations correctly followed the assumptions. The assumptions imply iteration until the distance to the target is less than W/2. So if D<W/2, then N=0, it takes no steps to meet the conditions. The initial equation could more rigorously be expressed as:
r^N D < \frac{W}{2}
where N \in \{0, 1, 2, ... \}.
I find it hard to believe that the reference (Card et al) would have made such an omission. Unless the article means to say that the Shannon formula is advantageous assuming one is too lazy to add cases to one's formulas? 
In fact, the Shannon form, or maybe I should say the Mackenzie form since apparently that's who invented it, implies that moving your cursor to a button takes some non-zero time dependent on the distance to the centre of the button, even when your cursor is already inside the button from the start. I'm dubious. -- Tim Starling (talk) 03:21, 16 February 2008 (UTC)
replies: text: Tim, my understanding is that there is some controversy over the MacKenzie form. If you are interested read this paper, which is devoted to a discussion of the concerns you mentioned: IBM Tech Report. (Published in the International Journal of Human-Computer Studies 61(6): 791-809. "Special issue: Fitts' law 50 years later: Applications and contributions from human-computer interaction". Kristensson (talk) 09:38, 29 June 2008 (UTC)
thread_title: ID non-negative

message: "Fitts's law" is definitely a hard one. The question whether it should be "Fitts's" or "Fitts'" aside, shouldn't "law" be capitalized?  —Preceding unsigned comment added by 138.246.7.148 (talk) 08:13, 9 April 2008 (UTC)
replies: text: Why would it be?  The wikipedia convention is to only capitalize first word and proper nouns in titles; see List of scientific laws named after people. Dicklyon (talk) 05:41, 28 May 2008 (UTC)
thread_title:  Capitalization 

message: A whole law for something obvious? And no, a screen edge doesn't have an infinite width. 85.4.214.87 (talk) 21:10, 4 March 2010 (UTC)
replies: text: Um? It has “infinite” width because you can move a mouse pointer indefinitely in one direction, and stay at the edge. And Fitts’s law is not especially obvious: just look around at all the software which violates the implied design principles. –jacobolus (t) 04:21, 5 March 2010 (UTC)
thread_title: What is all that bullshit? :D

message: Not much happening on this page for a couple years, but exciting stuff is happening in the research community, partly driven by the advent of interesting pointing devices for large displays (e.g. nintendo wiimote). Here are some pieces of information that will drive edits I'd like to make, and I'm first soliciting feedback or disagreement before making them.
-Fitt's law is in fact not nearly the rock-solid model it's described as in many, many places, including this article. I can cite journal articles in which the model fails spectacularly (R^2 drops around 0.8 or lower), by simply extending the range and combination of distances and widths tested. 
-The information theoretic claim about 'bits per second' is flat wrong, and in the original research was simply asserted by analogy and not mathematically demonstrated. R. William Soukoreff published at least one paper showing that the information theory does not hold up. 
-Competing models to Fitts's law exist, and outperform it. They have existed all they back to within ~5 years of the original model being published. A recent study rather thoroughly validated a specific alternative to Fitts's law that requires 3 parameters instead of 2 (Shoemaker, 2012) The F-test was used to compare models with different numbers of parameters fairly. Opinion: everyone loves a single number in bits/second to quantify performance, and so gravitated to this candidate law in the face of evidence that it's not objectively as good at predicting movement times.
-The Accot-Zhai steering law is not a general, appropriate extension of Fitts's law to 2D tasks; it only applies to pulldown menus or similar. The basic Fitts's law model as-is applies to 2D tasks with *circular* (or spherical in higher dimensions) targets, with some important fixes, which have been studied and documented in published works by e.g. Jacob Wobbrock.
-Yves Guiard has made the criticism that prescribing a very specific accuracy of a human motor task and then only measuring time duration is problematic, as opposed to allowing the user to freely make a speed/accuracy tradeoff each time and characterizing this. This is not a mainstream POV but is an interesting idea at the forefront of research.
-The section that walks through the iterative sub-movement derivation of Fitts's law is one of many over-simplified and incorrect attempts to provide an underlying explanation for why the law holds (which, recall above, it doesn't actually). Absent a community consensus around a single correct and complete explanation for why a movement time prediction model holds, what justification is there for including just one in the article? There isn't even consensus around what the law should be. 
I anticipate push-back on these edits because they reflect some very recent research that contradicts over 50 years of (flawed) research, and I want to make sure I can make edits that conform to WP standards before wasting time on edits that will be reversed. So please fire away at the above or request more detailed justification of problematic assertions. Cheers.
--eecharlie 14:15, 3 November 2014 (UTC)
thread_title:  Substantial proposed updates 

message: I removed the hatnote
because the string fitt does not occur in that article, except in the phrase "a burial fitting a king". —Tamfang (talk) 03:40, 11 December 2015 (UTC)
replies: text: And the only mention of a law is "Kaluza's law". I also can't seem to find any such named law in the poem, so unlikely that Beowulf readers would end up here. Looks fine to me. Opencooper (talk) 04:11, 11 December 2015 (UTC)
thread_title:  Old English poetry 

message: The statement the model implies that a target distance and width combination can be re-scaled arbitrarily without affecting movement time, which is impossible should be substantiated by a reference to literature. IMHO, it is not obvious that this is impossible. (Never mind that newer studies show that for large D's and W's Fitts' law does not fit very well, as someone pointed out above.)
Gabriel (talk) 13:15, 15 January 2018 (UTC)
thread_title:  Effect of rescaling D/W 

message: The variable D in Fitts's Law is the distance from the starting point to the center of the target, but the illustration shows D as the distance to the EDGE of the target. Since the illustration is wrong this should be corrected.  — Preceding unsigned comment added by 185.113.96.80 (talk) 12:59, 29 March 2018 (UTC)
replies: text: Seems to be fixed. Kriomet (talk) 22:21, 11 February 2021 (UTC)
thread_title:  The illustration is wrong 

message: This article has been reorganized and significantly extended by User:Mantury as part of the coursework for the course 'Interaction Techniques and Technologies' (summer 2019) at the University of Regensburg, Germany.  —Preceding undated comment added 21:06, 20 January 2020 (UTC)
thread_title:  Revision