Effect of the Notch a Cursor Cannot Enter for Pointing Movement Time

Yosuke Oba, Homei Miyashita

Keywords: Graphic user interface, Human computer interaction, Mouse pointing, Human motor performance, Notch

TL;DR: The notch area at the top of the MacBook Pro (2021) display should be an area where the cursor cannot enter.

Abstract: The notch on the top edge of the MacBook Pro (2021) display hides the mouse cursor even though the cursor can move under this area. Avoiding the notch or moving the cursor carefully around the notch can increase the movement time. In this study, we perform three experiments to evaluate the effect of the notch on the movement of the mouse cursor. In Experiment 1, we showed that the notch increases the pointing movement time under specific scenarios. In Experiment 2, we showed that it is better to avoid the notch instead of moving the cursor under the notch given its current specification. Finally, in Experiment 3, we showed that changing the notch to an area where the cursor cannot enter is an effective approach that allows the user to point at the target more rapidly and accurately if the target is adjacent to the notch. This is because the outer edge of the notch stops the cursor, and this results in faster and more accurate target pointing. Thus, the notch should be an area where the cursor cannot enter.

Track: HCI/visualization

Summary Of Changes:

# The focus on the Macbook Pro (2021) is a little strange as overall motivation, I wonder if notches should be described generally and the Macbook Pro (2021) cited as an example that this paper explores. (Reviewer qNPz)
We have now modified the first sentence of the Introduction to describe a notch in general.

# Experiment one doesn't directly look at the effect of the presence of the notch, but rather the distance of the target from the notch. (Reviewer qNPz)
We have now added a description of the interval between the notch and the target for the results of Experiment 1 described in the Introduction.

# typo "minfor" page 3. (Reviewer qNPz)
We have now fixed.

# should it be a threshold of r^2 < 0.9 at the end of section 8.3, or > 0.9? (Reviewer qNPz)
We have now determined that this threshold statement should be changed to r^2 > 0.9 and have modified it.

# it might be clearer if paragraph 3 was put after paragraphs 4/5 as it is kind of the results of the studies. (Reviewer 8kQ3)
We have now put paragraph 3 after paragraphs 4/5 and made a correction to make the context clear.

# The related work is well structured, but I think it lacks some discussions, like what are the limitations of the previous work and how previous work inspires or is different from this one. (Reviewer 8kQ3)
We have now added statements in Sections 2.1 and 2.2 explaining the limitations of the related studies and how they differ from our study.

# In study 1, most parameters were described in mm, but the diameter of the start area was described in pixels. (Reviewer 8kQ3)
We have now added both pixel and mm descriptions.

# It would be nice to add some more details for the design of the study because we expect one paper should be understandable without the need to read too many previous works. (Reviewer 8kQ3)
We have now added a brief explanation of the reason for the references where we have referred to previous studies for the values of the experimental conditions.

# I understand the reason for asking the participants to avoid clutching actions, I wonder since there are no hard rules to disable them from doing it in Study 1, how these rules were followed exactly during the studies. Also, I think it would be nice to add a discussion of this rule to the realism of this study because in real-world scenarios, users might just clutch it for speed. (Reviewer 8kQ3)
We have now added that no participant did a clutching action in all experiments.
We have now added a discussion of the effects of clutching action to the limitations.

# I understand the authors' intention to fit theoretical models with their measured data, but it seems that the usefulness of the models was not sufficiently discussed, thus it is not trivial to know what are the add-values of fitting the models. The authors could for example extend a little bit to give some real-world examples of how the models could be used in the future world. (Reviewer 8kQ3)
We have now added the potential of the model proposed in our study to the limitations.

# For Study 2, I did not get if the order of Strategy was fixed, counter-balanced, or randomized for each participant. (Reviewer 8kQ3)
We have now added that the order of the strategies is counterbalanced.

# The plot of results could have some space to improve, such as adjusting the width of each bar and the distance between them. Also, the authors might consider stating what the error bars represent in their figure descriptions. (Reviewer 8kQ3)
We have now made a modification to the graphs that unifies the width of the bars for better readability. We have now added that the error bars on the graph indicate the standard error.

# I am not a native speaker myself nor am I very good at exactly finding or pointing out to errors, but some sentences in the manuscript definitely read as quite bizarre to me. (Reviewer WQr7)
We have now corrected the difficult-to-read parts of the manuscript after the revision as much as possible, and again with the English proofreading service.

# The authors seem to have used statistical tests without verifying the assumptions that they have. Could the authors justify that the assumptions of these tests are not violated? I wonder if the authors could provide exact p-values as well, at least for p-values that are greater than 0.001. (Reviewer WQr7)
We have now added a postscript on the robustness of the ANOVA analysis with citations to a previous study.
We have now modified all the places where we used thresholds to describe p-values that were greater than 0.001 to actual values.

# I wonder if the authors would be willing to sharing their code for these experiments such that they could be replicated or transferred into other applications and future research. (Reviewer WQr7)
We uploaded the source code and data for the experiment and added the URL of the project page in the footnotes.