Designing Your Site: Fitt's Law
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Proximity & Size of Linked Features
"The basic idea in Fitts's Law is that any time a person uses a mouse to move the mouse pointer, certain characteristics of objects on the screen make them easy or hard to click on. The farther the person has to move the mouse to get to an object, the more effort it will take to get to. The smaller the object is, the harder it will be to click on. Pretty simple, right? It means that the easiest objects to locate and target are the ones closest to the mouse's current position and that have large target spaces... The worst possible object is one that is very far away from the current position of the cursor, and very small in size." Microsoft Developer Network (https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms993291.aspx) "If you want your website visitors to take actions like order a product, read about a service or click on something, then you must make sure that they can reach the ‘click here’ more easily and quickly. Thus, it is a good idea to consider this law and use it well." An article by Martin Luenendonk for Entrepreneurial Insights (June 3, 2015) with permission from the author. (http://www.entrepreneurial-insights.com/web-design-principles-successful-websites/). What about your site: Does your site make it easy to reach and click on items? 1 = Too much mouse movement required and/or linked features are too small to click easily. 10 = Linked features are very easy and natural to reach; and linked features provide a large clickable area. How might you improve your site's ease of mouse movement and clickability? Add this to your ePortfolio "to do" list. |
Examples
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NO
http://www.gatesnfences.com/ Links are close together and are not very large http://www.irishwrecksonline.net/ Main linked feature is at the bottom... one of the last places I looked. Had to read the text at the bottom to know how to enter the site. http://www.007museum.com/ All or most of the linked features are text. The features crowd each other. YES http://quotesmagazine.com/ This site is actually very intuitive... but only after you know what it is, which is a collection of interviews with various folk. Images and titles draw you in. https://sites.google.com/site/edpb530/main The two most important links for the term are larger than all of the others and are close to the top. |
Adapted from an article by Martin Luenendonk for Entrepreneurial Insights (June 3, 2015) with permission from the author. (http://www.entrepreneurial-insights.com/web-design-principles-successful-websites/).
