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PointAssist: helping four year olds point with ease
Conference proceeding

PointAssist: helping four year olds point with ease

Juan Hourcade, Keith Perry and Aditya Sharma
Proceedings of the 7th international conference on interaction design and children, pp.202-209
IDC '08
06/11/2008
DOI: 10.1145/1463689.1463757

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Abstract

Children's difficulty in point-and-click tasks using indirect pointing devices such as the mouse has been documented in several studies. This difficulty is manifested in a lack of control near the target, which often results in children clicking inaccurately. This paper presents and evaluates PointAssist , a tool that helps children in pointing tasks by detecting the type of motion that occurs when children have difficulty pointing at a target, and triggering a precision mode that slows the speed of the mouse cursor in those cases. We conducted a study with 30 four year old participants who completed point-and-click tasks with and without PointAssist. PointAssist provided participants with significant advantages in terms of click accuracy, enabling them to be as accurate as 18 to 22 year olds in a previous study with a very similar setup.
algorithm children human-computer interaction mouse pointing tasks sub-movements

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