Abstract
The benefits of two-handed interaction have been heavily researched and new
input devices that presumably better support such interaction are common. Yet
the standard desktop setup today continues to be a keyboard and pointing
device. Despite its universality, there does not exist a systematic description
of two-handed interaction with this setup. Our work fills that gap. We
conducted observational studies with 37 design application users focusing on
three fundamental elements of two-handed interaction: (1) the configurations
hands assume (the different positions the two hands are in relative to the
input devices), (2) how much time is spent in each configuration, and (3) how
often the hands move between the configurations. We propose a model that
describes the patterns of two-handed interaction that occur broadly across all
users, for example that every user had a configuration in which s/he spent the
majority of his or her time (for most users this was one hand on the left side
of the keyboard and one hand on the mouse). We also document where there are
individual differences in patterns, namely in how much each hand moves. The
three-staged analytic approach we took to arrive at these findings is
described, along with implications for design.
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