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Comment by epistasis | Hacker News Reader

I don't think a proper term has ever been used before now. There was a lot of thought put into the angle of escape when accessing sub-menus in the pull down menus. See the answer to "Question 6" in the link below. If anybody know the proper term, Tog would, and he doesn't appear to know of one.

http://www.asktog.com/columns/022DesignedToGiveFitts.html

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Interesting link, thanks. I remember some worry about the "diagonal movement" issue during the OS X transition, e.g. in Siracusa's DP2 review:

http://arstechnica.com/apple/reviews/1999/12/macos-x-dp2.ars...

I hadn't realized that while this was "fixed", it was not actually made identical with the older Mac OS behavior.

I guess all those experts citing Fitts' Law have to find a new toy when touchscreens get the predominant means to interact with the UI.

According to Wikipedia (for what that's worth), Fitts' law has been established to apply just fine to touch interfaces (third paragraph under http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fitts%27s_law#Success_and_impli... ).

I’m curious why you seem to think that Fitt’s law doesn’t apply to touch interfaces. Sure, certain concepts can’t be translated 1:1 (like infinite sized targets at screen edges) but even those have somewhat similar counterparts in touch interfaces (screen edges are also special places with larger targets in touch interfaces).

How are screen edges no longer infinite? If I ask you to tap something and drag it off an edge of the screen, you don't have to aim.

Your finger won’t be stopped by the screen edge.

So, it takes the same amount of time to tap something on a touchscreen, no matter what size it is and how far away it is from your finger, then?

There's no reference to this in "Tog on Interface" either, but he repeatedly references Fitt's law. I think that applies to the "escape angle" as well.

I think it follows from Fitts' Law or rather is its reverse:

If the cursor is outside an area, the bigger and closer this area is the easier it is to purposefully hit. ⇔ If the cursor is inside an area, the bigger this area is and the farther away its borders are, the harder it is to accidentally leave.

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