A comparison of three computer cursor control devices: pen on horizontal tablet, mouse and keyboard

Abstract

It might seem likely that an electronic pen manipulated on a desk top tablet would elicit better performance and greater user preference than other cursor control devices. This paper presents four experiments that examine this hypothesis by comparing speed, accuracy, and preference for a pen device with the two most widely used cursor control devices (mouse and keyboard) in a drawing (graphics) environment. In the context of these experiments pen use was never significantly faster than mouse, while both pen and mouse use were always significantly faster than the keyboard. In contrast, keyboard use was always more error free than the mouse, which in turn was always more error free than the pen. These error differences were significant in a majority of the cases. Subjects expressed preference for the mouse in general work (significant). For highly accurate work, subject preference was for the keyboard (significant).