Abstract
The mouse wheel may induce physical fatigue by requiring users to clutch the wheel repeatedly when scrolling long distances. To address this problem, some mouse products provide a free-spinning mode in which users can spin the wheel to initiate inertial scrolling. However, the time and effort required to toggle the free-spinning mode may lower the usability of the mouse wheel. To enable inertial scrolling without the overhead of mode switching, we present TouchWheel, a physical mouse wheel with touch sensitivity and a virtual wheel model that enables users to perform flick-and-stop operations as they do on touchscreens. A user experiment revealed that participants could actively use TouchWheel’s flick-and-stop operation according to their different scrolling needs. For tasks that frequently required long-distance scrolling, TouchWheel outperformed a normal mouse wheel in task completion time and required fewer clutching and mode-switching actions than the normal mouse wheel and a spin-enabled mouse wheel. For tasks that required short-distance scrolling, TouchWheel performed similarly to other baseline options.
Published Version
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