Hacker News Reader

Comment by hcarvalhoalves | Hacker News Reader

Because the title on HN is "AI", which makes it a small click target [1], prone to accidental upvotes.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fitts's_law

Yes, that's exactly how this article gained my upvote. For misclicks and link-bait, I would love to see HN add the ability to retract votes from articles. I have many "saved stories" that I'd love to remove from my list.

280 votes and counting. I'm betting this will stay on the first page for a long time.

IMO this is much more interesting than a multi-billion dollar exit of a simple chat application

I just did that. iPad here, click target is below 44px.

This happens to me all the time on my phone. HN should make bigger voting arrows (or at least on mobile devices).

There is actually a neat web app for mobile devices: http://hn.premii.com

Isn’t Fitt’s law about how long it takes to aim for an element of a certain size at a certain distance? I think this has nothing to do with Fitt’s law.

It has everything to do with accuracy. Smaller targets take more time to aim; that implies your accuracy depends on how close to the optimal speed you aim.

I still don’t see what this time-distance-size relation has to say about this case. Do you mean that one could infer since arrow and title are equal in size and close together it requires minimal time to point from the one to the other? It seems like breaking a butterfly on a wheel referring to Fitt’s law here. Sorry for nit-picking, maybe I’m missing something.

1) People aim fast. 2) The target "AI" is small. 3) They miss, and click the arrow instead.

It's not that complicated.

You don’t need Fitt’s law for what you’re saying. It’s obvious that small objects are difficult to aim for. This is the main thing I dislike about HCI/UX: More often than not people have to unnecessarily refer to laws or norms to sell their observations.

The only non-obvious insights Fitt’s law bring are that objects twice as big and twice as far away take the same time to aim for, and that as objects become smaller or distance increases the time only grows logarithmically. Everything else is just squeezed into its definition to make it sound well-founded.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com