Opinionated Mouse Pointer
Screens are so big nowadays! Controls such as buttons and links only take a very small amount of available space. This leads to an ergonomic challenge: how can we use all the available space and still make sure the user can easily reach and click the elements? The mouse pointer often is at absolutely useless positions, and I wanted to try to reduce these states.
The idea that I came up with for my website was to introduce element gravity. When moving the mouse pointer, it should easily move towards nearby control elements - the closer they are, the more they should impact the mouse pointer movement's direction.
And it worked! Kind of. For low gravity values, it turned out to be relatively usable. To make it work very well, it would require a more complex algorithm and a lot of balancing. For example, sometimes, it is very hard to leave elements. Moving the mouse pointer feels like work.
Eventually, I dropped the idea due to usability reasons, but I extracted it into a separate demo. Check it out here: goldst.dev/demo-opinionated-mouse-pointer
This demo features components from the hatch headless design system.
back