[IxDA Discuss] Anticipatory Gestures

[Keith_Karn]

Dan, Josh, and others -
I studied such anticipatory movements for my dissertation research. I 
was looking at both hand and eye movements. It turns out that we 
regularly move our eye to the object that we intend to click on in 
advance of the hand movement. As the slower hand movement begins to 
close in on the target object, our eyes are typically off looking at 
the next interesting thing even before the mouse click. More details 
here:
     Karn, K. & Hayhoe, M. (2000) Memory representations guide targeting 
eye movements in a natural task. Visual Cognition. 7:673-703.
As for the behavior of people apparently selecting random text while 
reading... I do something like that when I'm reading along document on 
the screen and use the highlighting of selected text as sort of a 
bookmark to help me keep my place while scrolling.

As for Josh's point about the "Next" button position changing from 
screen to screen; that isn't so much of a case of anticipatory 
movement, but more a case of requiring unanticipated movement.

Keith Karn
------------------------------
On 3/15/2007 "Josh Viney" <jviney at gmail.com> wrote
> We've seen very similar behavior when testing search results and photo
> slideshows. Nothing seems to frustrate users more than when the "Next" 
> and
> "Previous" links move around.

On 3/15/07, Dan Brown <brownorama at gmail.com> wrote:
> Something interesting happened in usability testing yesterday. .... 
> one of our users had anticipated a control being in one part of
> the screen, so he moved the pointer there prior to the screen fully
> loading.
> He had good reason to. This particular site was divided into four
> sections. Three of the four sections located the control in the lower
> right corner. The fourth in the lower left.
> Our participant noticed this immediately and pointed it out. The quote
> that'll go in my report is something like this: "See, I put my mouse
> here because that's where the others were."....