A Comparative Research Of Visually Enhanced Display Techniques For Cursors

A cursor is an essential widget in graphical user interfaces(GUIs),and it is invaluable in the process of human-computer interaction.However,we sometimes lose tracking the cursor and cannot find it immediately.We proposed eight novel visually enhanced display techniques(VEDTs,i.e.,flashing the cursor,adding diffusing rings to the cursor,adding halos to the cursor,adding diffusing halos to the cursor,adding shrinking halos to the cursor,adding arrows to the cursor,adding flashing arrows to the cursor,adding rotating arrows to the cursor)to help users locating a cursor more easily and quickly.Two experiments were conducted in our study,i.e.,the pilot and the formal experiments.The pilot experiment,which included three control factors(block,background,and cursor shape),was to determine the time threshold of overtime error in the formal experiment.Besides the aforementioned three factors,another factor,technique(15 levels,i.e.,the baseline and 14 VEDTs),was added in the formal experiment.Through thorough comparisons,the formal experiment was conducted to evaluate the proposed and other existing related techniques.The experimental results show that the usefulness and performance of these techniques were dependent on their applied contexts and the cursor shapes.All the visually enhanced techniques performed faster than the base line technique(without any visually enhanced effects)in a common or a complex background.And the cursor-shape deforming technique totally outperformed all the others concerning task completion time in any kind of background.