Issues Related to Using Finger-Fitts law to Model One-Dimensional Touch Pointing Tasks

Abstract

Finger-Fitts law [6] is a variant of Fitts’ law which accounts for the finger ambiguity in touch pointing. In this paper we investigated two research questions related to Finger-Fitts law: (1) Should Finger-Fitts law use nominal target width W or effect target width We to model MT? and (2) should Finger-Fitts law use a pre-defined value (denoted by σa) or a free parameter (denoted by c) to represent the absolute ambiguity caused by finger touch? Our investigation on two touch pointing datasets showed that there are cases where using nominal width has stronger model fitness, and also cases where using effective width is better. Regarding the representation of finger ambiguity, using a free parameter c to represent the ambiguity of finger touch always leads to stronger model fitness than using the pre-defined σa, after controlling for overfitting. It indicates that viewing the finger ambiguity as an empirically determined parameter has more flexibility to capture the ambiguity of finger touch involved in the study. Overall, our research advances the understanding on how to model Finger touch input with Finger-Fitts law.