Cornell University Ergonomics Web

Fitts' Law Spiral Task

NOTE: This works best in Mozilla Firefox or Google Chrome browsers!

This task was developed by Ruokun Ren at Cornell University.

Fitts' Law Spiral Experiment Setup Instructions:

Instructions

 The Spiral task takes three parameters width, number of turns, and number of trials.

1. Type in the track widths (pixels)
2. Type in the number of turns of the spiral track
3. Type in the number of trials

4. To complete a successful trial, you will need to start from the center of the spiral, press and hold the left mouse key, pass the start line and go through the spiral until reaching the finish line.

Output

The output is the following:

• Target track width
• Number of turns
• ID - the Index of Difficulty
• MT - the average movement time in milliseconds
• Number of errors

Saving your Output

The output is a table of five columns, each representing width, number of turns, Index of difficulty, mean movement time and number of errors.

 Select the table, copy, and paste into excel after the task is finished

Since the trajectory task is based on Fitts law, the results should also fit a linear relation of ID-movement time.

Tasks

• Start the Fitts' Spiral Task
• Go to the Fitts' Reciprocal ClickingTask
• Go to the Fitts' Radial Reciprocal ClickingTask
• Go to the Homing (keyboard/mouse) task.