2005/06/14 Fitt's Law

Fitt's Law concerns itself with our ability to "acquire a target" - in the computer world, find and click on something we want. It says the ease of doing that is function of the distance to the target, and the size of the target. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fitts'_law.

In the real world, there is of course much more to it - the smoothness and predicability of motion (Meyer's law takes some of that into account) and the behavior of the target when it can be selected are important factors also - good design means more than just direct attention to Fitt's Law. Usability covers a lot of ground. However, that doesn't stop people from using Fitt's Law as part of an OS feature shoot-off: http://www.xvsxp.com/general/#fittsLaw compares Mac OS X to Windows XP (OS X wins, by the way - duh!).

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