A short idea on thinking about how to have a mouse click, without actually clicking on it.
Before studying about this, if we think about recent innovations in mouse movements like a single tap, double tap, 3 finger touch, tap and drag etc to move ahead, behind, zoom in or out, rotate etc, it's interesting to see that the actual mouse click exists for every long number of years, without actually evolving. In brief, it's still a problem yet to be solved in the field of Human Computer Interaction. I have seen some of the past studies proposing a mouse click to be simulated on various actions, though none of which has materialized into a real product.
Food for thought
If I have to think about proposing a mouse click, without click, I propose to 'drawing horizontal eight' as my click mechanism. Clicking an object without probably clicking it in reality can be achieved through multiple ways. I’m going to explain various options I considered, before opting for this particular mechanism.
1. Having a timeout to simulate click is probably the easiest, but what should be the ideal timeout the user should wait is a BIG question. Consider, if we configure it as small as 10ms or little higher at 10seconds, the possibility of accidental selection is still very high, say, if the user takes a break with mouse pointer a few seconds.
2. The next thing I considered is to have multiple cross strikethroughs on an object. In this case, it is normal for the user to navigate the page as left to right, left to right – think of this case as VERY BIG strikethroughs, in this scenario, there is a whole confusion as to which object should be clicked.
3. The next thing I considered is a “circle” or a “4 –walled trapezoid” over the target. In this scenario, even if the circle is slightly bigger like 1cm or a trapezoid at 0.5cm each side, there could be more than 1 targets inside it. Again it’s not straightforward design to choose which target shall be selected.
4. So, all these above problems, forced me to think of a drawing that is kind of little easy to draw, plus has an intersection center point while drawing, as this can minimize the problem of selecting the target for click. It’s pretty straightforward to choose the object at the intersection for click. A “vertical eight” is little difficult for the user to draw onscreen, compared to “horizontal eight”, which is free-flowing. TRY THIS ONCE ONSCREEN, ALSO TRY VERTICAL EIGHT. Also as per Fitts law, the time taken to draw a horizontal eight, is much lesser than vertical eight, hence the throughput is higher. One can see that horizontal eight is much easier on hands ergonomically too. Also, in horizontal eight, even if the eight is damn smaller or much larger, still the selection is going to be at the intersection. Hence, it’s not really error prone.