The design space of input devices

A bewildering variety of devices for communication from humans to computers now exists on the market. In order to make sense of this variety, and to aid in the design of new input devices, we propose a framework for describing and analyzing input devices. Following Mackinlay's semantic analysis of the design space for graphical presentations, our goal is to provide tools for the generation and test of input device designs. The descriptive tools we have created allow us to describe the semantics of a device and measure its expressiveness. Using these tools, we have built a taxonomy of input devices that goes beyond earlier taxonomies of Buxton & Baecker and Foley, Wallace, & Chan. In this paper, we build on these descriptive tools, and proceed to the use of human performance theories and data for evaluation of the effectiveness of points in this design space. We focus on two figures of merit, footprint and bandwidth, to illustrate this evaluation. The result is the systematic integration of methods for both generating and testing the design space of input devices.