Study Of Adaptive Bubble Cursor

As the Graphical User Interface(GUI) becoming popular, pointing such as mouse clickoperation has become one of the main forms of user interface input techniques. As pointing iswidely used in GUI, even a slight improvement in pointing performance would have substantialeffects on using efficiency. Thus, enhancing the performance of pointing has become the mainissue of Human Computer Interface research.A variety of pointing enhancement techniques in order to facilitate pointing at targets hadbeen put forward. In this study, bubble cursor was selected as the typical pointing enhancementtechnology and its superiority on pointing performance was verified. And then, the adaptivebubble cursor was designed which was based on two kinds of adaptive algorithms in consider ofusers’ operation habits. The operation characteristics of the adaptive bubble cursor and theeffects of the cognitive style on users’pointing performance were discussed.This dissertation was composed of four experiments in three phase. In the first phase, twoexperiments were presented that evaluated bubble cursor performance in different tasks. In thesecond phase, another experiment was presented that evaluated adaptive bubble cursorperformance. In the third phase, an experiment was presented that studied the impact of the usercognitive style on pointing performance of adaptive bubble cursor.Two kinds of new adaptive bubble cursor were introduced in this study and theexpreimental results showed that:(1)The bubble cursor significantly outperformed the point cursor,especially selecting smalltargets.(2)The adaptive bubble cursor significantly outperformed the bubble cursor.(3)User cognitive style had an obvious impact on the operation of the adaptive bubblecursor. The users of field-dependent performed better than the users of field-independent.The adaptive bubble cursor, which made up the defects of traditional bubble cursor andperfected the pointing enchancing technology, could adapt itself based on the users’ operation habits.The adaptive bubble cursor was valuable for the mouse pointing operation optimizationand the user application in GUI.