Abstract: Mouse pointing is a basic operation in the graphical user interface. In order to improve the users’ pointing performance, the current study developed two kinds of adaptive cursors based on the bubble cursor (Grossman & Balakrishnan, 2005, April), which is the current fastest known general pointing technique. Moreover, we carried out an empirical experiment to verify the effect of these two adaptive cursors (compared to the bubble cursor). The current study consists of two parts. The first one describes the development of the two adaptive cursors. The effective width of the new cursors could be changed dynamically according to the different adaptive algorithm, as shown in Fig. 2. This study adopted two typical adaptive algorithms: one chooses the most used item as the adaptive item, and the other the most recently used item. Based on these two adaptive algorithms, we respectively named the new cursors the frequency adaptive bubble cursor and the time adaptive bubble cursor. The second part is an empirical experiment. The experiment testbed was developed in C++. All sessions were run on a 1680×1050 22-inch widescreen monitor connected to the Sony laptop. The mouse used during the experiment was a Lenovo MOL9UL mouse connected over USB, and the parameters were all set to the default. The experiment was a single factor between-subjects design with 3 levels (cursor type: bubble cursor, frequency adaptive bubble cursor and time adaptive bubble cursor). The dependent variables were accuracy, operation time, and user’s satisfaction evaluation. The satisfaction questionnaire was based on a study (Laukkanen et al.，2008, April). There were five aspects of evaluation: speed, operation difficulty, appearance fitness, learnability and overall preference. Sixty right-handed adults participated in the current study (33 females and 27 males), and randomly assigned to 3 levels of cursor type. For each group, participants were asked to finish 82 times of pointing tasks with a mouse as accurately as possible, which the accuracy and the time were recorded. After the pointing tasks, participants’ subjective evaluation was performed. All data were processed by SPSS 17.0. The mean and standard deviation of three cursor types’ performance and satisfaction evaluation were shown in Table 1. The ANOVA results showed: 1) Participants pointing with two adaptive cursors were faster than with the bubble cursor (ps < .05). 2) There were no significant difference between the two adaptive cursors both on the performance and subjective evaluation (ps >.05). 3) Participants felt more comfortable with the frequency adaptive cursor than the bubble cursor: speed, operation difficulty (ps <. 05). And on the overall preference, these two adaptive cursors were better than the bubble cursor (ps <. 05). The results taken together indicated that the two adaptive cursors are better than the bubble cursor. However, there is no significant difference between the two adaptive cursors. According to the real-life experience, we can infer that, different adaptive cursors can be used in different scenarios. This suggests that our study will help to improve the pointing performance for different people and different environments. In summary, these findings provide empirical evidences for the development and optimization of the pointing augmented technique.

Key words: pointing augmented, bubble cursor, adaptive

摘要： 本研究选取了气泡光标这种典型的点击增强技术作为研究对象,从用户操作习惯和特点出发,提出基于频次算法的和基于时间算法的自适应气泡光标,并试图通过实验研究来探索这两款自适应气泡光标的影响作用。结果显示：1)基于频次算法的和基于时间算法的自适应气泡光标在操作绩效和主观评价上均显著优于气泡光标；2）两款自适应气泡光标在操作绩效和主观评价上无显著差异。本研究的结果为点击增强技术的设计优化提供了新的设计思路。

关键词: 点击增强, 气泡光标, 自适应