An Empirical Evaluation of Seven Mice for Scrolling Tasks

Users can easily and conveniently operate scrolling task components with pointing devices such as mouse wheels, by a simple motion of one finger. In this paper, two experiments which comprehensively evaluated the scroll performance of scrolling devices are reported. Seven devices, Scroll Wheel, Side Wheel, Smooth Wheel, Scroll Ball, Scroll Point, Scroll Stick and Scroll Panel, which are embedded in seven kinds of pointing device were tested in a dragging task and in a webpage browsing task respectively. Experimental results showed that Smooth Wheel and Scroll Point could be used as the optimal scrolling devices in a dragging task and a webpage browsing task respectively.