Multi-flick: An Evaluation of Flick-Based Scrolling Techniques for Pen Interfa

Multi-flick, which consists of repeated flick actions, has received popular media attention as an intuitive and natural document-scrolling technique for stylus based systems. In this paper we put multi-flick to test, by designing several flick-based scrolling techniques. We first map out the de-sign space of multi-flick and identify mapping functions that make multi-flick a natural and intuitive technique for document navigation. In the first experiment we compare several multi-flick variations for navigating lists on three different devices – a PDA, a tabletPC, and a large table. Our study shows that compound-multi-flick (CMF) is the most preferred technique and it is at least as fast, if not faster than the traditional scrollbar. In a follow-up experi-ment, we evaluate multi-flick for scrolling text-based documents. Results show that all implementations of multi-flick are as good as the scrollbar for short distances while CMF is the most preferred. We discuss the implications of our findings and present several design guidelines.