Mouse Cursor Operation for Overlapped Windowing and Its Evaluation

Abstract

When we perform a task that involves operating many windows, we cannot access the objects behind them. As a result, we are frequently forced to switch the foreground window or temporarily forced to move it. Such window manipulations arise because of the difference between the dimensions of the windows and the cursor. In this paper, we propose a technique, in which the cursor is able to go underneath windows using a normal mouse. The results of our user study show that our technique allows users to perform a task faster than they typically operate windows using mouse-only and mouse-keyboard operations.