UsabilityDesignPatterns/BigFittsLawTarget

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Big Fitts' Law Target

Important things that users need to be able to click on quickly should be large, because according to UsabilityDesignPatterns/FittsLaw large targets are easier to hit.

The edges of the screen have effectively infinite depth for Fitts' Law purposes - the user can just slam the mouse all the way in a certain direction to rapidly hit the edge of the screen or a corner of the screen. Therefore, putting important targets in the extreme corners of the screen (and not, say, one pixel away from the extreme corner of the screen, which defeats the whole purpose) makes them easy to hit.

(This is only really helpful if you are working in an interface that gets to control the whole screen - games, operating systems, etc. Web pages not so much, unfortunately.)

Besides the corners, the other place on the screen that can be hit very quickly is the pixel under the mouse. So you can cheat at having a BiggFittsLawTarget by putting your target directly under wherever the mouse happens to be. (This is one of the rationales behind a UsabilityDesignPatterns/ContextMenu.)