UIST 2007

Dirty Desktops: Using a Patina of Magnetic Mouse Dust to Make Common Interactor Targets Easier to Select
Amy Hurst, Jennifer Mankoff, Anind K. Dey, Scott E. Hudson

Comments:
Comment #1
Comment #2
Comment #3


Summary:
The authors of this paper are attempting to create a platform independent system that will aid users in selecting highly used buttons by jumping the mouse to these buttons when the mouse is close by. This is also independent from the applications that are being used. There is no code required by application developers for this to work in their applications.

The whole idea is to use every mouse click as "magnetic mouse dust." Wherever there was a mouse click on the window of an application, it would be recorded. As buttons were repeatedly clicked, magnetic mouse dust would gather over them. Whenever the mouse approached these dirty areas, the mouse would be attracted to the button and land on the buttons. This made it very easy to land the mouse on a button once the system had learned where all of your clicks have congregated. This is able to be independent from the application because system events just record the x and y coordinate of the click in relation to the window.

There were two types of dust: dust that accumulated when the mouse was clicked and dust that accumulated when the mouse was dragged. The dust that correlated to dragging the mouse aided in dragging scrollbars and the like. Users found the entire system to be helpful. Some users took longer to grow accustomed to the mouse being controlled by the computer, but after they got the hang of it, they enjoyed it.


Discussion:
This seems like an effective system. I would have to use it to see if it would benefit me at all, but I know that there are some users with physical disabilities that could really benefit from this kind of assistive device.

The one thing that the paper did not address that I had questions about was what happened when the window resizes, either by force of the user or the computer. It could either clear all the dust and start over, or, since the dust is computed in relation to the top left corner of the window, the dust move to still be at the same coordinates in relation to that corner. Both could be useful, depending on the application. Some applications anchor everything to the top left corner and it would be fine to keep the dust. Some buttons anchor to other sides though and the dust would be congregating over a portion of the screen that was no longer a button after a resize. The paper was not clear on what happened to the dust.