Push-Edge and Slide-Edge: Scrolling by Pushing Against the Viewport Edge

International audienceEdge-scrolling allows users to scroll a viewport while simultaneously dragging near or beyond a window’s edge. Common implementations rely on rate control, mapping the distance between the pointer and the edge of the viewport to the scrolling velocity. While ubiquitous in operating systems, edge-scrolling has received little attention, even though previous works suggest that (1) rate control may be suboptimal for isotonic pointing devices like mice and trackpads and (2) space beyond the window’s edge might be scarce, limiting scrolling control. To address these problems, we developed Push-edge scrolling (and Slide-edge scrolling, its inertial variant), two novel position-based techniques that allow scrolling by ‘pushing’ against the viewport edge. A controlled experiment shows that our techniques reduce overshoots and offer performance improvements by up to 13% over traditional edge-scrolling