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PieCursor: Merging Pointing and Command Selection for Rapid in-Place Tool Switching

George Fitzmaurice, Justin Matejka, Azam Khan, Michael Glueck, Gordon Kurtenbach
January 2008 · Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI)

Abstract

We describe a new type of graphical user interface widget called the \"PieCursor.\" The PieCursor is based on the Tracking Menu technique and consists of a radial cluster of command wedges, is roughly the size of a cursor, and replaces the traditional cursor. The PieCursor technique merges the normal cursor function of pointing with command selection into a single action. A controlled experiment was conducted to compare the performance of rapid command and target selection using the PieCursor against larger versions of Tracking Menus and a status quo Toolbar configuration. Results indicate that for small clusters of tools (4 and 8 command wedges) the PieCursor can outperform the toolbar by 20.8% for coarse pointing. For fine pointing, the performance of the PieCursor degrades approximately to the performance found for the Toolbar condition.

DOI PDF

Figures

Figure 1. The PieCursor concept: a collection of tools arranged in a radial pattern Tracking Menu and shrunk to the size of a cursor.
Figure 2. Command wedges chosen by input direction.
Figure o. FieCursor usage sequence tor nignlignting, activating, operating and releasing a commana.
Figure 4. Extended wedge regions (dotted lines).
Figure 5. Comparing the “chunking and phrasing” of interaction events across techniques.
Figure 6. Comparison of interaction techniques.
Figure 7. (front) Tracking Menu (back) PieCursor.
Figure 8. Cursor activity (red = drag; grey = movement, green dot = click).
Figure 9. Seven techniques (three interaction methods with 4 or 8 commands).
Figure 10. Experiment workspace.
Figure 11. Trial sequences: 1, 2, 3. Command and drag direction shown (a) PieCursor4 and BigWheel4 (b) PieCursor8 and BigWheel8 (c) BigWheel8 4+4, (d) Toolbar4, (e) Toolbar8.
Figure 12. Trial performance mean by method.
Figure 13. Trial performance mean by technique and number of commands (4 or 8).
Figure 14. Trial performance mean by method and target size.
Figure 15. Average mouse travel distances (pixels) per trial, grouped by target size and method.
Figure 16. Subjective preference.
Figure 17. (a) flea cursor; (b) mini-arrow; (c) directional arrow.

BibTeX

@inproceedings{10.1145/1357054.1357268,
 abstract = {We describe a new type of graphical user interface widget called the "PieCursor." The PieCursor is based on the Tracking Menu technique and consists of a radial cluster of command wedges, is roughly the size of a cursor, and replaces the traditional cursor. The PieCursor technique merges the normal cursor function of pointing with command selection into a single action. A controlled experiment was conducted to compare the performance of rapid command and target selection using the PieCursor against larger versions of Tracking Menus and a status quo Toolbar configuration. Results indicate that for small clusters of tools (4 and 8 command wedges) the PieCursor can outperform the toolbar by 20.8% for coarse pointing. For fine pointing, the performance of the PieCursor degrades approximately to the performance found for the Toolbar condition.},
 address = {New York, NY, USA},
 author = {Fitzmaurice, George and Matejka, Justin and Khan, Azam and Glueck, Michael and Kurtenbach, Gordon},
 booktitle = {Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems},
 doi = {10.1145/1357054.1357268},
 isbn = {9781605580111},
 keywords = {marking menus, radial menus, flow menus, pie menus, floating palette, pen based user interfaces, control menus, tracking menus, multifunction cursor},
 location = {Florence, Italy},
 numpages = {10},
 pages = {1361–1370},
 publisher = {Association for Computing Machinery},
 series = {CHI '08},
 title = {PieCursor: Merging Pointing and Command Selection for Rapid in-Place Tool Switching},
 url = {https://doi.org/10.1145/1357054.1357268},
 year = {2008}
}