More on pie menu usability issues and what may be happening

I am still seeing people that have a lot of problems with the new pie menus. Seems like, every night at the club, we get at least one person who says, "I can't pay the Money Sploder." Even one of my co-managing partners has trouble with it, saying, "When I click the sploder, I see the 'Return' option, not 'Pay.'"

For now, I am telling these people, "Click and HOLD the right mouse button on the sploder, move the cursor towards Pay, and release." This is a useful workaround. But I think I know what may be happening, and what may need to be done about it.

If you look at a lot of mice sold these days, such as the standard ubiquitous Microsoft Wheel Mouse, you'll see that the buttons are angled so that clicking down on one exerts a force on the mouse that is not strictly "down," but actually "down" and a little "backwards" (the direction that corresponds to "down" on screen). In addition, the way human fingers curve will also force the mouse backwards a little bit when it's clicked...especially if the mouse is not being gripped firmly.

This may be causing the client to see a series of mouse events that looks not so much like "right button down, right button up" as it does "right button down, mouse move in 'down' direction for some small number of pixels, right button up." (It's probably more likely to happen with optical mice than ball mice, as those are more sensitive to motion.) The new gestural system is interpreting this as "pie menu select 'down' direction" instead of "click display pie menu." Since the option in the "down" direction is usually "More >", this causes the second-level pie menu to be displayed rather than the top-level one...and, for objects such as the Money Sploder, "Return..." occupies the lower-left space on the second-level pie menu, the same space that "Pay..." occupies on the top-level one. (Most people will see that grayed out, but landowners--such as my co-managing partner--will see the "Return..." option.)

The solution would appear to be to reduce the sensitivity of the "gesture" system; either require the mouse to travel more pixels with the mouse button down before interpreting that click as a "gesture," or require the mouse button to be held down longer before interpreting the click as a "gesture," or both. Perhaps this needs to be a new slider under Preferences for "Gesture Sensitivity." (If such a slider already exists, my apologies; I don't have the client open in front of me right now.)

I hope I've been clear in my phrasing; perhaps this will help one of the developers that wants to resolve this issue once and for all.

Erbo, I love your title of "Electric Resi".

Thanx for the explanation. In the due course of investigating the pie menu, I've been finding that some things are really difficult to fluidly to explain through words. You've done an admirable job.



I'm going to check this out in greater depth today.

What's been *particularly* useful to us as of late have been... VIDEO BUG REPORTS! I've made several displaying the errata within. So if you have any, fill me in on this too! I can do a frame-by-frame analysis, which is especially important with the subtle different in behavior a few travelled pixels can make.