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The technology they demonstrate is impressive and clever. That's just a neat way to improve GUI's. But what they use their method to do (implement bubble curs

The technology they demonstrate is impressive and clever. That's just a neat way to improve GUI's. But what they use their method to do (implement bubble cursor and sticky icons) seems like it would harm usability. With bubble cursor, the downside is that any accidental click of the mouse (those happen with touch pads on laptops) is guaranteed to trigger some gui element. Also, if you are in the midpoint of two gui elements, a tiny, tiny shift in the mouse could lead to clicking the wrong thing. Which could be very back when the "save draft" and "discard" buttons are right next to each other, as in gmail. The upside is... that I don't have to move my mouse quite as far? Bur if not having to move your mouse as far is a good thing, why implement that sticky elements feature, which guarantees you will have to move your mouse much farther after moving over an element? Both the bubbles and sticky things seem designed to make ui elements much easier to click on, but unless you have muscle control problems (which I suppose some people do, especially the elderly) I don't think that's generally a good thing. There are too many buttons that do things that you just can't undo.

rimantas 17y ago
Very good points. What they do is interesting, but useless—at least in the way it is presented. The main problem is—you cannot bolt on good UI, it must be designed from the very beginning. Anything else is just a lipstick on a pig.
- shaddi 17y ago
  Both parent and parent^2 make fine points, but it misses the point of this research. It's primarily to enable HCI research -- so the ability to modify interfaces on the fly is a good thing. User customization of interfaces is another application, but I don't think that is really the primary use case.
- olefoo 17y ago
  But if you're stuck dealing with a pig, it may as well be a pretty pig.
Retric 17y ago
There is a reason this stuff is still experimental. However, it's easy to think of new options like bubble cursor + maximum bubble size which you want to explore. How about a Bubble cursor preview with a touch interface? That seems like a pure win, but how about using the iPhone's keyboard preview when clicking on non keyboard icons etc. What's hard is finding out how this impacts current applications which is the whole point of this demo.
sanj 17y ago
Bubble cursor worries me far less than sticky icons. The mapping between mouse and pointer displacement is currently a well defined linear relationship that humans can internalize trivially. I've always felt that mouse "acceleration" undermined that relationship, but at least it was in a way that mapped to the motion of the mouse. Changing that to include all possible targets en-route to your destination seems almost malicious: I know where I want to move the pointer but other GUI elements in between will try to thwart me!
- Qz 17y ago
  An easy fix would be a speed threshold. Studies show that most movements to targets involve a high speed phase and then a deceleration phase near the target (example from the original Fitts law studies if you read up on that). So simply set a threshold for movement speed. If the mouse is moving faster than X, don't use sticky controls. Once the speed drops below X, turn on sticky controls.
ximeng 17y ago
I just put together a javascript + canvas demo of bubble cursors based on the demo in the video. It does make it a lot easier to target small elements. http://mwomwo.nfshost.com/bubblecursor/bubbles.html http://mwomwo.nfshost.com/bubblecursor/bubbles.html I agree with you that stickiness doesn't sound like a great feature. Clicking the wrong thing also seems like a risk, but that might be better solved by making buttons not do things that you can't undo. Bubble cursors seems to me like it could definitely be a win.
- rauljara 17y ago
  Upvote for you, for awesome effort. But your demo confirms for me all my suspicion about bubble cursor. Hang out at the midpoint between three bubbles of all different sizes and it just seems incredibly unintuitive to me which one is highlighted. Yes it makes small things easier to click on (sometimes much easier than gigantic things), but as I said above, I don't think that's a good thing because of all the buttons that have functions that can't be undone. You mentioned making buttons that do not do things that you can't undo, but how would that work in a save dialogue box, or when you've just typed up an angry email you never intended to hit send with?
  - ximeng 17y ago
    Thanks. This story: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1235081 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1235081 talks a bit about the points you've made. Basically you put a passive delay in that's long enough for people to cancel. It's not going to work for everything though - sometimes you really do want to start a process immediately. The biggest benefit comes when you've got a large bit of empty space on one side of an object. That space then becomes clickable. In a world with big monitors it's harder to get easy UI wins by putting important widgets on the side of the screen. You could get a similar effect with these bubble cursors.
    - nwinter 17y ago
      I just tried limiting the max bubble cursor radius in your demo and it seemed to prevent the unwanted gap-clicking problem well enough, while still helping buttons be easier to click. Not sure if it reduces the win in the proposed huge-screen example.
fhars 17y ago
But the point of the technique is not that the specific experiments shown are known beforehand to be superior, but that it allows you to perform arbitrary UI experiments on on every piece of software to find out which ideas are good and which not so.

rimantas 17y ago

Very good points. What they do is interesting, but useless—at least in the way it is presented. The main problem is—you cannot bolt on good UI, it must be designed from the very beginning. Anything else is just a lipstick on a pig.

shaddi 17y ago
Both parent and parent^2 make fine points, but it misses the point of this research. It's primarily to enable HCI research -- so the ability to modify interfaces on the fly is a good thing. User customization of interfaces is another application, but I don't think that is really the primary use case.
olefoo 17y ago
But if you're stuck dealing with a pig, it may as well be a pretty pig.

Retric 17y ago

There is a reason this stuff is still experimental. However, it's easy to think of new options like bubble cursor + maximum bubble size which you want to explore. How about a Bubble cursor preview with a touch interface? That seems like a pure win, but how about using the iPhone's keyboard preview when clicking on non keyboard icons etc. What's hard is finding out how this impacts current applications which is the whole point of this demo.

sanj 17y ago

Bubble cursor worries me far less than sticky icons. The mapping between mouse and pointer displacement is currently a well defined linear relationship that humans can internalize trivially. I've always felt that mouse "acceleration" undermined that relationship, but at least it was in a way that mapped to the motion of the mouse. Changing that to include all possible targets en-route to your destination seems almost malicious: I know where I want to move the pointer but other GUI elements in between will try to thwart me!

Qz 17y ago
An easy fix would be a speed threshold. Studies show that most movements to targets involve a high speed phase and then a deceleration phase near the target (example from the original Fitts law studies if you read up on that). So simply set a threshold for movement speed. If the mouse is moving faster than X, don't use sticky controls. Once the speed drops below X, turn on sticky controls.

ximeng 17y ago

I just put together a javascript + canvas demo of bubble cursors based on the demo in the video. It does make it a lot easier to target small elements. http://mwomwo.nfshost.com/bubblecursor/bubbles.html http://mwomwo.nfshost.com/bubblecursor/bubbles.html I agree with you that stickiness doesn't sound like a great feature. Clicking the wrong thing also seems like a risk, but that might be better solved by making buttons not do things that you can't undo. Bubble cursors seems to me like it could definitely be a win.

rauljara 17y ago
Upvote for you, for awesome effort. But your demo confirms for me all my suspicion about bubble cursor. Hang out at the midpoint between three bubbles of all different sizes and it just seems incredibly unintuitive to me which one is highlighted. Yes it makes small things easier to click on (sometimes much easier than gigantic things), but as I said above, I don't think that's a good thing because of all the buttons that have functions that can't be undone. You mentioned making buttons that do not do things that you can't undo, but how would that work in a save dialogue box, or when you've just typed up an angry email you never intended to hit send with?
- ximeng 17y ago
  Thanks. This story: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1235081 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1235081 talks a bit about the points you've made. Basically you put a passive delay in that's long enough for people to cancel. It's not going to work for everything though - sometimes you really do want to start a process immediately. The biggest benefit comes when you've got a large bit of empty space on one side of an object. That space then becomes clickable. In a world with big monitors it's harder to get easy UI wins by putting important widgets on the side of the screen. You could get a similar effect with these bubble cursors.
  - nwinter 17y ago
    I just tried limiting the max bubble cursor radius in your demo and it seemed to prevent the unwanted gap-clicking problem well enough, while still helping buttons be easier to click. Not sure if it reduces the win in the proposed huge-screen example.

fhars 17y ago

But the point of the technique is not that the specific experiments shown are known beforehand to be superior, but that it allows you to perform arbitrary UI experiments on on every piece of software to find out which ideas are good and which not so.