TouchWheel: Enabling Flick-and-Stop Interaction on the Mouse Wheel

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.