Clutching Is Not (Necessarily) the Enemy

Mathieu Nancel (1) , Daniel Vogel (1) , Edward Lank (1)

1 David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science

Clutching is usually assumed to be triggered by a lack of physical space and detrimental to pointing performance. We conduct a controlled experiment using a laptop trackpad where the effect of clutching on pointing performance is dissociated from the effects of control-to-display transfer functions. Participants performed a series of target acquisition tasks using typical cursor acceleration functions with and without clutching. All pointing tasks were feasible without clutching, but clutch-less movements were harder to perform, caused more errors, required more preparation time, and were not faster than clutch-enabled movements.

Mots clés: clutching; pointing; performance; trackpad

Domaines: Interface homme-machine [cs.HC]

Mathieu Nancel, Daniel Vogel, Edward Lank. Clutching Is Not (Necessarily) the Enemy. ACM CHI 2015, Apr 2015, Seoul, South Korea. ⟨10.1145/2702123.2702134⟩. ⟨hal-01523428⟩