For several hours now I’ve been using a little Java applet called Mousepath that tracks your mouse movements over a single screen. The lines represent the drag, the black circles represent the mouse at rest (the larger the circle, the longer pause), and the white circles represent clicks. It’s an interesting diagram to me because it shows that the center of the screen is “home.” It is where I focus my attention, rest my mouse, and click. The drag moves from the center to the upper corners, and then down again to my task bar. But the movements are only relevant when you consider that I was using Outlook, Word 2007 (ribbons off, customized quick view), Lexis, Loislaw, and Google today. I would be interested to know what other legal researchers’ mousepaths would look like, and if common visual data points could mapped. One of the things I noticed about my drag is that I tend to read text on the screen with the help of my cursor, but I didn’t know it. In a touch-based environment, I won’t be able to do that anymore. Does that seem weird to me? I don’t know yet.
In thinking about the use of programs like these for UI design, I wondered about Thomson Reuters eye-tracking surveys they did for the new WestlawNext. Did they track lawyers’ eyeballs when they were sitting in front of their normal operating environment? Do you tend to look for information in an “F-shaped” manner? Does it even matter? When you look at the mousepath images for other types of users (check these images out on Flickr), it seems like the center of the screen is where it’s at. I’m beginning to think more and more that context menus you can activate in the middle of the screen might actually save time, rather than having to travel to the edges.
Note, the applet does not record travel over dual-monitor setups. I wish it did so I could have a better understanding of travel over the two screens, but as it is, this gives me a good sense of where programs and websites I use on a day-to-day basis focus my attention.
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