The Correlation Between Perceived Comfort and Actual Efficiency When Using Different Cursor Input Devices

As computers become more reliable and used in many different types of businesses, it is important to have an effective way of interfacing with them. The two main ways to interact with a computer are keyboards and mice. The purpose of this experiment was to test these alternatives and how comfortable different people found them to be in hopes of finding if a relationship between comfort and efficiency exists. The devices used were a mouse, trackpad, trackball, and nipple mouse. It was hypothesized that people would perform better with a device they found more comfortable, but that people would also show some bias towards mice for comfort and efficiency due to larger exposure to them. Participants were given a minute with each device to do a practice run of a clicking activity to allow them to get a feel for each device, and then were asked to do the activity again for another minute during which data were gathered. After doing the activity for each of the four devices, the participant was asked to rank each device by how comfortable they found it. ANOVA analysis revealed that all data but accuracy had significant variation between devices. However, after data in a table for a Chi Squared indicated a massive bias towards mice that prevented any further analysis, it was concluded that any correlation between comfort and efficiency would be far less relevant than experience and practice with a device