Inventions on selecting GUI elements
This work tackles GUI usability issues for developers and designers, but it is incremental as it reviews existing inventions rather than proposing novel methods.
The article addresses fundamental difficulties in GUI selection mechanisms, illustrating solutions from US patents without presenting new experimental results or numerical improvements.
Selecting an object or element is a fundamental operation in any graphic user interface. It is necessary to select an object before doing any operation (such as, dragging, copying, opening, deleting etc.) on that object. The GUI may provide features to select any single object or even multiple objects. The feature of selecting multiple objects can provides tremendous power to the GUI as the user can do complex operations on multiple objects in one go. However, the process of selection is not as simple as it appears to the user of a GUI. The internal logic of a selection mechanism can be very complex in some situations. The article describes some fundamental difficulties associated with the selection mechanism, and illustrates the solutions provided by different inventions selected from US patent database.