Improving Business Performance: A Study of Four Input Devices for Scrolling and Pointing Tasks

Navigating through online documents has become an increasingly common parrt of the user interaction. This paper investigates 3 alternative methods of using a dedicated input device in combination with standard keyboard and mouse to push the user performance ceiling for browsing Web and other documents. In a task that involved both scrolling and pointing, we compared three input methods against the status-quo. The results showed that a mouse with a finger wheel did not improve users' performance: two other methods, namely a mouse with an isometric rate-control joystick operated by the same hand and a two handed system that put a mouse on the dominant hand and a joystick on the other, both significantly improved users' performance. A human factors analysis on each of the three input methods is also presented.