Distractor Effects on Crossing-Based Interaction

Task-irrelevant distractors affect visuo-motor control for target acquisition and studying such effects has already received much attention in human-computer interaction. However, there has been little research into distractor effects on crossing-based interaction. We thus conducted an empirical study on pen-based interfaces to investigate six crossing tasks with distractor interference in comparison to two tasks without it. The six distractor-related tasks differed in movement precision constraint (directional/amplitude), target size, target distance, distractor location and target-distractor spacing. We also developed and experimentally validated six quantitative models for the six tasks. Our results show that crossing targets with distractors had longer average times and similar accuracy than that without distractors. The effects of distractors varied depending on distractor location, target-distractor spacing and movement precision constraint. When spacing is smaller than 11.27 mm, crossing tasks with distractor interference can be regarded as pointing tasks or a combination of pointing and crossing tasks, which could be better fitted with our proposed models than Fitts’ law. According to these results, we provide practical implications to crossing-based user interface design.