Drop-and-drag
Sebastian Doeweling, Urs Glaubitt · 2010
Large displays have been found to offer a number of benefits over average-sized desktop displays: They increase productivity in office settings, improve performance on spatial tasks and offer increased user satisfaction in several contexts. However, their physical dimensions can complicate drag & drop interactions for users, especially when touch or pen input is used. Existing approaches (e.g. push-and-pop) have addressed this problem for simple drag&drop operations, but fall short when it comes to more complex ones (e.g. dropping a target onto a currently hidden node of a file tree or a specific location on a digital map).To address this issue, we propose drop-and-drag, an interaction technique which introduces fully interactive proxy targets and which allows the interruption and resumption of drag & drop operations. The results of a controlled experiment show that drop-and-drag is significantly faster than traditional drag & drop for sufficiently distant targets. Additionally, the results report improved user satisfaction when drop-and-drag is used, especially for complex drop targets.