Cursor Positioning on an Electronic Display Using Lightpen, Lightgun, or Keyboard for Three Basic Tasks

Abstract

Three basic tasks were designed to measure how fast a user could position a cursor at various locations on an electronic display. The tasks were arbitrary cursor positioning, sequential cursor positioning, and check-reading for errors. Three cursor positioning devices were tested. Both lightpen and lightgun permitted faster cursor positioning than a poorly designed keyboard. These pointing devices were four to five times faster than the keyboard for the arbitrary positioning task, and about twice as fast for the other tasks.