4 ms·

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

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.
  - ximeng 17y ago
    On my local copy I put in something so that it looks at the second closest object to the cursor. Then only selects if the nearest object is 40% closer than the second nearest. It works pretty well to prevent ambiguity, but still gets a bit confusing when there's a few objects of different sizes nearby. Quite want to try this functionality in a real user-interface now!
- jerf 17y ago
  "Adding a passive delay" is very nearly a synonym for "adding latency". Not quiet. But close.
Qz 17y ago
Another fix for the midpoint issue would be to create a dead space threshold -- for example, if the threshold is set at 5 pixels then any area where a 5 pixel movement would change the bubble target is turned into non-clickable space. Possibly all potential targets could be highlighted in a different color, to indicate that the system isn't sure where you want to click.

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.
- ximeng 17y ago
  On my local copy I put in something so that it looks at the second closest object to the cursor. Then only selects if the nearest object is 40% closer than the second nearest. It works pretty well to prevent ambiguity, but still gets a bit confusing when there's a few objects of different sizes nearby. Quite want to try this functionality in a real user-interface now!
jerf 17y ago
"Adding a passive delay" is very nearly a synonym for "adding latency". Not quiet. But close.

Qz 17y ago

Another fix for the midpoint issue would be to create a dead space threshold -- for example, if the threshold is set at 5 pixels then any area where a 5 pixel movement would change the bubble target is turned into non-clickable space. Possibly all potential targets could be highlighted in a different color, to indicate that the system isn't sure where you want to click.