Fitt's Law: for designing Applications with better User Experience

Citation

S. MacKenzi, “Fitt’s Law as a Research and Design Tool in Human-Computer Interaction.” 1992.

Link: http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1461857

With this world becoming more tech-savvy day-by-day, there is even more need of having applications/devices that caters well to a great user experience. No matter what how good or complex a problem an application can solve, it cannot succeed until and unless it has a captivating and intuitive user interface. So, if provided a metric that can judge how well an application scores on user interface, the UI can be improved by leaps and bounds. Fitt's Law is one such metric that is being widely used in the field of Human-Computer Interaction.

Fitt's Law is being used to model the movement time from a point to a target. It is given by:

T = a + b log2(2A/W)

where T = Movement time from a point to the target point

           A = Distance from that point to the target point

          W = Width/Area of the target

           a,b  are the model parameters

As is clear from the formula, the more is the distance, more is the movement time. More is the width of the target, lesser is the movement time.

Thoughts:

Though the idea presented by Fitt's is pretty old (1954) but it still holds relevance in today's world and is being widely used as a research and designing tool in the field of HCI.

Applications and Ideas:

This can be used to judge the age of a person as movement time is one of the major distinguishing factor for people with different ages.