Improving Browsing Performance: A study of four input devices for scrolling and pointing tasks

Alternative methods to improve user performance for browsing World Wide Web and other documents are investigated in a task that involved both scrolling and pointing and showed that a mouse with a fmger wheel did not improve user’s performance.

Abstract

Navigating through online documents has become an increasingly common HCI task. This paper investigates alternative methods to improve user performance for browsing World Wide Web and other documents. In a task that involved both scrolling and pointing, we compared three input methods against the status-quo. The results showed that a mouse with a fmger wheel did not improve user's performance; two other methods, namely a mouse with an isometric rate-control joystick operated by the same hand and a two handed system that put a mouse on the dominant hand and a joystick on the other, both significantly improved users' performance. A human factors analysis on each of the three input methods is also presented.