Help me get a distinction in HCI
Posted by Jacques Chester on Tuesday, August 28, 2007
One of my topics this semester is Human-Computer Interaction. The first assignment involves gathering click reaction times in order to study Fitt’s Law.
I’ve written a little doohickey where you can click on an iPod. Originally it was going to be super-dooper with sounds and effects and Facebook integration 11. Aside: The gag was that most such things need you to punch a monkey to “win” an iPod; in ours you would shoot iPods and “win” a money. Ahhh, undergraduate humour [↩]. However I need data more than dazzle as the assignment is due in less than 2 weeks.
So go ahead and visit. All you need to do is click on the iPod as fast as you can. You can click it as little or as much as you like. The link opens in a new window so you can close it easily if you want to.
Update: Thanks to everyone so far. Here’s the stats as of this morning:
mysql> use hci; select count(distinct(ip_address)) as addresses, count(*) as total_clicks, ( count(*) / count(distinct(ip_address)) ) as avg_per_visitor, avg(reaction_time) from data; Database changed +-----------+--------------+-----------------+--------------------+ | addresses | total_clicks | avg_per_visitor | avg(reaction_time) | +-----------+--------------+-----------------+--------------------+ | 65 | 4631 | 71.2462 | 0.8002740 | +-----------+--------------+-----------------+--------------------+ 1 row in set (0.00 sec)
This entry was posted on Tuesday, August 28th, 2007 at 5:45 PM and filed under Education, Uncategorised.
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You owe me 30 seconds of my life.
My time required to move is affected by the fact I don’t have a proper mouse pad and use a copy of “Fun with Geology” (1971) instead. It can get a little clammy. Do you have a greek letter put aside in your Fritt’s Law for that?
Posted on 28-Aug-07 at 6:29 pm | PermalinkI think we could bust out a rho if we had to.
Posted on 28-Aug-07 at 6:30 pm | PermalinkJacques
I can’t see an iPod or anything else, just a blank screen. Maybe you need to include instructions for idiots like me. Could your doohickey be getting blocked by some security feature on my PC?
Posted on 28-Aug-07 at 6:31 pm | PermalinkThat’s possible. It relies on some hairy Javascript to do its funky thing.
It’s also possible a few Firefoxisms crept in. Thanks to the browser wars reliable scripting of this kind is essentially impossible.
Posted on 28-Aug-07 at 6:33 pm | PermalinkI use explorer and I only saw a blank screen.
The thought of submitting work for an assignment hasn’t been on my mind for years!
Posted on 28-Aug-07 at 8:24 pm | PermalinkThats funny. I use Fitt’s law for psych students. Everyone must love it.
If you want to see where Fitts law doesn’t work, try doing the task with your non-dominant hand. This is bad luck really — as I can imagine it would otherwise be really handy for estimating things for groups with movement disorders.
I also seem to remember there a good discussion on the Microsoft soft as to why they don’t use it — you could optimize screens, buttons etc. for yourself.
Posted on 28-Aug-07 at 9:06 pm | PermalinkSorry, that was a weird sentence. It should be Microsoft site, not Microsoft soft!
Posted on 28-Aug-07 at 9:07 pm | Permalink