6 ms·

Whilst your point is fair, I do think the fitt's law benefits are pretty huge (ie the infinitely extending target because it's across the screen edge). It real

Whilst your point is fair, I do think the fitt's law benefits are pretty huge (ie the infinitely extending target because it's across the screen edge). It really depends on usage patterns I guess. If you have lots of _really_ small windows then your point is entirely correct, but if people are using large windows then it becomes less clear - there's a fair chance they're moving almost as far to reach the edge of the window for the in-window menu bar, but not benefiting from the screen edge infinite target, at which point the macos model becomes superior. The thing is I suspect the cut-off applies even for half-screen windows these days, I think the benefits of screen edge scale better than the benefits of window edge (since you can always move faster if you don't have to aim well). On the other hand, I guess there's an upper limit to practical window size, regardless of how large screens get.

Asooka 4y ago
Fitt's law makes little sense for touchpads, which are the primary pointing device for macOS PCs nowadays.
endgame 4y ago
The Fitt's Law benefits decrease with the distance you have to travel to reach the bar, though. It always takes me several gestures on mouse or trackpad to reach the top bar on modern display resolutions. Better to just have good accelerator keys (not that any of the major desktops seem to do that in a discoverable way).
- madeofpalk 4y ago
  Fitt's Law says ease of use is a function of size and travel distance. Items on the edge of the screen have "infinite" size, so they're "infinitely" usable (according to fitts law)
  - wruza 4y ago
    In practice, the longest single mouse run one can do is finite, and it may be comparable to a distance, depending on cursor settings.
  - nawgz 4y ago
    I stack my screens vertically; therefore, menu bars on top of the bottom screen are indeed quite finite in size.
- AshamedCaptain 4y ago
  > It always takes me several gestures on mouse or trackpad to reach the top bar on modern display resolutions First, resolution should have nothing to do with this. Second, even on the largest 4K display that I have, and assuming that you have a mouse curve with acceleration, I only have to thrust the mouse for about 1-2cm of physical distance in order to reach the opposite edge of the screen. If you are moving the mouse ultra slowly to the edge, then yes, it may take a while to reach it. But the entire point of Fitt's law is that you just thrust the mouse towards that edge as fast as you can since you're not going to overtake it.
  - wruza 4y ago
    Some people do not use acceleration (but one can argue that they are in a minority). I was pro acceleration until I bought a steelseries pad with an aluminum legs mouse. A home tech that never migrated to my workplace so quickly.
mavhc 4y ago
Fitts' law forgets one thing, once you've selected your menu, you'd probably want to return to where you came from. Popup menus also take 0 mouse movement, so they win over any other form
- DonHopkins 4y ago
  Great point! It's not that Fitts' Law forgot it, but that the designer of "infinite height" menu bars (Bruce "Tog" Tognazzini) didn't foresee today's gigantic and multiple screens, and was designing for the original Mac, whose screen was tiny and singular in comparison! Linking to an archive.org cache since Tog's web site's https certificate expired. A Quiz Designed to Give You Fitts: https://web.archive.org/web/20210208235052/https://www.asktog.com/columns/022DesignedToGiveFitts.html https://web.archive.org/web/20210208235052/https://www.askto... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fitts%27s_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fitts%27s_law The Fitts' Law benefits of pie menus are significantly more profound than the Fitts' Law benefits of the "infinite height" menu bar that Tog describes in his classic article, especially on large screens. And they don't result in you moving the cursor far away from where you want to be next. Fitts' Law says the target acquisition time (and error rate) is related to the target size (larger target = better, so pie menus make all the targets quite large, extending in all directions to all four edges of the screen; menu bars also do, but only in one direction, wasting three out of four screen edges), and the target distance (nearer target = better, so pie menus make all the targets uniformly quite nearby, exploiting all directions; menu bars don't minimize the distance, only exploit one possible direction (up), and you also have to move back too, so it's worse on a big screen). Also, multiple displays that you can move between throws a monkey wrench into the "infinite screen edge". Which may be one reason why nobody (except for the beautiful weirdo in the thread above ;) ) ever puts a screen above or below another screen, or a menu bar on the left or right edge, even though Windows has always let you do that, but the Mac doesn't. Pie menu: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pie_menu https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pie_menu SimCity pie menus (X11/TCL/Tk): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jvi98wVUmQA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jvi98wVUmQA More SimCity pie menus (Flash/OpenLaszlo/Python): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8snnqQSI0GE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8snnqQSI0GE Even more SimCity pie menus (Unity3D): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sMN1LQ7qx9g https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sMN1LQ7qx9g Blender pie menus: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=meVfv-ewhlk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=meVfv-ewhlk Lots of other pie menus: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2KfeHNIXYUc&list=PLX66BqHq0qTCWwzRxTJ-XQ8o5vP7pjDbv https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2KfeHNIXYUc&list=PLX66BqHq0q... There is another predictive model similar to Fitts' Law called "Steering Law" that applies to the narrow twisting "tunnel" from your current position, to the menu bar, through the menu and submenus, and back to where you need to be next, that you have to "steer" the cursor through in order to accomplish a task: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steering_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steering_law >The steering law in human–computer interaction and ergonomics is a predictive model of human movement that describes the time required to navigate, or steer, through a 2-dimensional tunnel. The tunnel can be thought of as a path or trajectory on a plane that has an associated thickness or width, where the width can vary along the tunnel. The goal of a steering task is to navigate from one end of the tunnel to the other as quickly as possible, without touching the boundaries of the tunnel. A real-world example that approximates this task is driving a car down a road that may have twists and turns, where the car must navigate the road as quickly as possible without touching the sides of the road. The steering law predicts both the instantaneous speed at which we may navigate the tunnel, and the total time required to navigate the entire tunnel. >The steering law has been independently discovered and studied three times (Rashevsky, 1959; Drury, 1971; Accot and Zhai, 1997). Its most recent discovery has been within the human–computer interaction community, which has resulted in the most general mathematical formulation of the law. Fitts' Law and Steering Law also apply to the forgiving pull-right submenu design that the original Apple Human Interface Guidelines described, which Tog invented, Apple forgot about (but finally rediscovered), and Amazon reinvented, which I was just writing about recently here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32961306 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32961306
birksherty 4y ago
Most people around world use small laptop screens, where having a top bar bad from fitt's law. Having infinite large window buttons (that are used often) on the top right corner is great and window menu/start button at bottom left corner.
pjc50 4y ago
Fitt's law does not apply to touchscreens, where the edges and corners are the least convenient places to touch.
- DonHopkins 4y ago
  Fitts' Law certanly does apply to touch screens. It's about target size and distance, not screen edge limits on motion, or relative motion -vs- absolute position input devices. The "infinite height menu bar" design uses screen edges to make the target size effectively "infinite", but it doesn't minimize the distance, and doesn't exploit any direction but "up". FWIW, Windows does let you place the task bar on any edge of the screen though, but you still can't have four task bars, one on each screen edge! The screen edge limits of mouse movement only apply to input devices like mice and track pads (motion sensitive), but not touch screens (position sensitive), because touch screens are position sensitive input devices, and your finger position is directly tied to the cursor position, so you can't move the cursor without moving your finger or vice-verse. This is related to the "nulling problem" that Bill Buxton wrote about in his taxonomy of input devices, "Lexical and Pragmatic Considerations of Input Structures": https://www.billbuxton.com/lexical.html https://www.billbuxton.com/lexical.html >One consequence of the second philosophy is that the same transducer must be made to control different functions, or parameters, at different times. This context switching introduces something known as the nulling problem. The point which we are going to make is that this problem can be completely avoided if the transducer in question is motion rather than position sensitive. Let us see why. >Imagine that you have a sliding potentiometer which controls parameter A. Both the potentiometer and the parameter are at their minimum values. You then raise A to its maximum value by pushing up the position of the potentiometer's handle. You now want to change the value of parameter B. Before you can do so using the same potentiometer, the handle of the potentiometer must be repositioned to a position corresponding to the current value of parameter B. The necessity of having to perform this normalizing function is the nulling problem. >Contrast the difficulty of performing the above interaction using a position-sensitive device with the ease of doing so using one which senses motion. If a thumb-wheel or a treadmill-like device was used, the moment that the transducer is connected to the parameter it can be used to "push" the value up or "pull" it down. Furthermore, the same transducer can be used to simultaneously change the value of a group of parameters, all of whose instantaneous values are different. https://www.billbuxton.com/input04.Taxonomies.pdf https://www.billbuxton.com/input04.Taxonomies.pdf Taxonomies of Input >Relative vs Absolute Controllers: One of the most important characteristics of input devices is whether they sense absolute or relative values. This has a very strong effect on the nature of the dialogues that the system can support with any degree of fluency. As we have seen, a mouse cannot be used to digitize map coordinates, or trace a drawing because it does not sense absolute position. Another example taken from process control is discussed in the reading by Buxton (1986a). This is the case of what is known as the nulling problem which is introduced when absolute transducers are used in designs where one controller is used for different tasks at different times.
nicoburns 4y ago
I think fitts law is precisely why it’s a bad design. I don’t use the menu bar very often, so I’d much rather have something else on the screen edge. Like browsers tabs for example, which I use all the time and sit on screen edge on windows/linux.
- boxed 4y ago
  Do they? It doesn't look at all like that when I google screenshots. It looks like there's some chrome in between the top of the screen edge and the start of the tab. At least in Chrome.
  - nicoburns 4y ago
    Screenshots are typically of non-maximised windows (where there is indeed a gap). That gap disappears if the window is maximised.
- SAI_Peregrinus 4y ago
  Tree-Style tabs might work for you, stick the tabs on a side edge of the screen instead of the top.
  - yellowapple 4y ago
    It's crazy to me that Chrome still doesn't support any real equivalent to this; it's 2022 and Chrome (AFAICT) still insists on shoving every single tab end-to-end at the top, squishing them into tiny unclickable slivers, like some absolute fucking maniac. Even Edge gets this right by supporting vertical tabs (albeit with far less sophistication than TST), and it was supposed to be a cold day in Hell before I ever gave a Microsoft-developed web browser any sort of praise.

Asooka 4y ago

Fitt's law makes little sense for touchpads, which are the primary pointing device for macOS PCs nowadays.

endgame 4y ago

The Fitt's Law benefits decrease with the distance you have to travel to reach the bar, though. It always takes me several gestures on mouse or trackpad to reach the top bar on modern display resolutions. Better to just have good accelerator keys (not that any of the major desktops seem to do that in a discoverable way).

madeofpalk 4y ago
Fitt's Law says ease of use is a function of size and travel distance. Items on the edge of the screen have "infinite" size, so they're "infinitely" usable (according to fitts law)
- wruza 4y ago
  In practice, the longest single mouse run one can do is finite, and it may be comparable to a distance, depending on cursor settings.
- nawgz 4y ago
  I stack my screens vertically; therefore, menu bars on top of the bottom screen are indeed quite finite in size.
AshamedCaptain 4y ago
> It always takes me several gestures on mouse or trackpad to reach the top bar on modern display resolutions First, resolution should have nothing to do with this. Second, even on the largest 4K display that I have, and assuming that you have a mouse curve with acceleration, I only have to thrust the mouse for about 1-2cm of physical distance in order to reach the opposite edge of the screen. If you are moving the mouse ultra slowly to the edge, then yes, it may take a while to reach it. But the entire point of Fitt's law is that you just thrust the mouse towards that edge as fast as you can since you're not going to overtake it.
- wruza 4y ago
  Some people do not use acceleration (but one can argue that they are in a minority). I was pro acceleration until I bought a steelseries pad with an aluminum legs mouse. A home tech that never migrated to my workplace so quickly.

mavhc 4y ago

Fitts' law forgets one thing, once you've selected your menu, you'd probably want to return to where you came from. Popup menus also take 0 mouse movement, so they win over any other form

DonHopkins 4y ago
Great point! It's not that Fitts' Law forgot it, but that the designer of "infinite height" menu bars (Bruce "Tog" Tognazzini) didn't foresee today's gigantic and multiple screens, and was designing for the original Mac, whose screen was tiny and singular in comparison! Linking to an archive.org cache since Tog's web site's https certificate expired. A Quiz Designed to Give You Fitts: https://web.archive.org/web/20210208235052/https://www.asktog.com/columns/022DesignedToGiveFitts.html https://web.archive.org/web/20210208235052/https://www.askto... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fitts%27s_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fitts%27s_law The Fitts' Law benefits of pie menus are significantly more profound than the Fitts' Law benefits of the "infinite height" menu bar that Tog describes in his classic article, especially on large screens. And they don't result in you moving the cursor far away from where you want to be next. Fitts' Law says the target acquisition time (and error rate) is related to the target size (larger target = better, so pie menus make all the targets quite large, extending in all directions to all four edges of the screen; menu bars also do, but only in one direction, wasting three out of four screen edges), and the target distance (nearer target = better, so pie menus make all the targets uniformly quite nearby, exploiting all directions; menu bars don't minimize the distance, only exploit one possible direction (up), and you also have to move back too, so it's worse on a big screen). Also, multiple displays that you can move between throws a monkey wrench into the "infinite screen edge". Which may be one reason why nobody (except for the beautiful weirdo in the thread above ;) ) ever puts a screen above or below another screen, or a menu bar on the left or right edge, even though Windows has always let you do that, but the Mac doesn't. Pie menu: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pie_menu https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pie_menu SimCity pie menus (X11/TCL/Tk): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jvi98wVUmQA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jvi98wVUmQA More SimCity pie menus (Flash/OpenLaszlo/Python): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8snnqQSI0GE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8snnqQSI0GE Even more SimCity pie menus (Unity3D): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sMN1LQ7qx9g https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sMN1LQ7qx9g Blender pie menus: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=meVfv-ewhlk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=meVfv-ewhlk Lots of other pie menus: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2KfeHNIXYUc&list=PLX66BqHq0qTCWwzRxTJ-XQ8o5vP7pjDbv https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2KfeHNIXYUc&list=PLX66BqHq0q... There is another predictive model similar to Fitts' Law called "Steering Law" that applies to the narrow twisting "tunnel" from your current position, to the menu bar, through the menu and submenus, and back to where you need to be next, that you have to "steer" the cursor through in order to accomplish a task: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steering_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steering_law >The steering law in human–computer interaction and ergonomics is a predictive model of human movement that describes the time required to navigate, or steer, through a 2-dimensional tunnel. The tunnel can be thought of as a path or trajectory on a plane that has an associated thickness or width, where the width can vary along the tunnel. The goal of a steering task is to navigate from one end of the tunnel to the other as quickly as possible, without touching the boundaries of the tunnel. A real-world example that approximates this task is driving a car down a road that may have twists and turns, where the car must navigate the road as quickly as possible without touching the sides of the road. The steering law predicts both the instantaneous speed at which we may navigate the tunnel, and the total time required to navigate the entire tunnel. >The steering law has been independently discovered and studied three times (Rashevsky, 1959; Drury, 1971; Accot and Zhai, 1997). Its most recent discovery has been within the human–computer interaction community, which has resulted in the most general mathematical formulation of the law. Fitts' Law and Steering Law also apply to the forgiving pull-right submenu design that the original Apple Human Interface Guidelines described, which Tog invented, Apple forgot about (but finally rediscovered), and Amazon reinvented, which I was just writing about recently here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32961306 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32961306

birksherty 4y ago

Most people around world use small laptop screens, where having a top bar bad from fitt's law. Having infinite large window buttons (that are used often) on the top right corner is great and window menu/start button at bottom left corner.

pjc50 4y ago

Fitt's law does not apply to touchscreens, where the edges and corners are the least convenient places to touch.

DonHopkins 4y ago
Fitts' Law certanly does apply to touch screens. It's about target size and distance, not screen edge limits on motion, or relative motion -vs- absolute position input devices. The "infinite height menu bar" design uses screen edges to make the target size effectively "infinite", but it doesn't minimize the distance, and doesn't exploit any direction but "up". FWIW, Windows does let you place the task bar on any edge of the screen though, but you still can't have four task bars, one on each screen edge! The screen edge limits of mouse movement only apply to input devices like mice and track pads (motion sensitive), but not touch screens (position sensitive), because touch screens are position sensitive input devices, and your finger position is directly tied to the cursor position, so you can't move the cursor without moving your finger or vice-verse. This is related to the "nulling problem" that Bill Buxton wrote about in his taxonomy of input devices, "Lexical and Pragmatic Considerations of Input Structures": https://www.billbuxton.com/lexical.html https://www.billbuxton.com/lexical.html >One consequence of the second philosophy is that the same transducer must be made to control different functions, or parameters, at different times. This context switching introduces something known as the nulling problem. The point which we are going to make is that this problem can be completely avoided if the transducer in question is motion rather than position sensitive. Let us see why. >Imagine that you have a sliding potentiometer which controls parameter A. Both the potentiometer and the parameter are at their minimum values. You then raise A to its maximum value by pushing up the position of the potentiometer's handle. You now want to change the value of parameter B. Before you can do so using the same potentiometer, the handle of the potentiometer must be repositioned to a position corresponding to the current value of parameter B. The necessity of having to perform this normalizing function is the nulling problem. >Contrast the difficulty of performing the above interaction using a position-sensitive device with the ease of doing so using one which senses motion. If a thumb-wheel or a treadmill-like device was used, the moment that the transducer is connected to the parameter it can be used to "push" the value up or "pull" it down. Furthermore, the same transducer can be used to simultaneously change the value of a group of parameters, all of whose instantaneous values are different. https://www.billbuxton.com/input04.Taxonomies.pdf https://www.billbuxton.com/input04.Taxonomies.pdf Taxonomies of Input >Relative vs Absolute Controllers: One of the most important characteristics of input devices is whether they sense absolute or relative values. This has a very strong effect on the nature of the dialogues that the system can support with any degree of fluency. As we have seen, a mouse cannot be used to digitize map coordinates, or trace a drawing because it does not sense absolute position. Another example taken from process control is discussed in the reading by Buxton (1986a). This is the case of what is known as the nulling problem which is introduced when absolute transducers are used in designs where one controller is used for different tasks at different times.

nicoburns 4y ago

I think fitts law is precisely why it’s a bad design. I don’t use the menu bar very often, so I’d much rather have something else on the screen edge. Like browsers tabs for example, which I use all the time and sit on screen edge on windows/linux.

boxed 4y ago
Do they? It doesn't look at all like that when I google screenshots. It looks like there's some chrome in between the top of the screen edge and the start of the tab. At least in Chrome.
- nicoburns 4y ago
  Screenshots are typically of non-maximised windows (where there is indeed a gap). That gap disappears if the window is maximised.
SAI_Peregrinus 4y ago
Tree-Style tabs might work for you, stick the tabs on a side edge of the screen instead of the top.
- yellowapple 4y ago
  It's crazy to me that Chrome still doesn't support any real equivalent to this; it's 2022 and Chrome (AFAICT) still insists on shoving every single tab end-to-end at the top, squishing them into tiny unclickable slivers, like some absolute fucking maniac. Even Edge gets this right by supporting vertical tabs (albeit with far less sophistication than TST), and it was supposed to be a cold day in Hell before I ever gave a Microsoft-developed web browser any sort of praise.