Monday, August 6, 2018

interaction design - Why is the mouse cursor slightly tilted and not straight?


Is this a legacy thing or does a tilted cursor serves a purpose? I can tell that, the angle provides a totally vertical left edge which helps when highlighting text but what else apart from that?


EDIT: When cursor is swapped by the little hand cursor when hovered over buttons, the angle seems to be smaller. Why the difference?



Answer



This is the historical reason:


Concept drawing of the standard mouse cursor at an angle


(Concept drawing taken from document: VLSI-81-1_The_Optical_Mouse.pdf)


The mouse, and therefore the mouse cursor, was invented by Douglas Engelbart, and was initially an arrow pointing up.


When the XEROX PARC machine was built, the cursor changed into a tilted arrow. It was found that, given the low resolution of the screens in those days, drawing a straight line (left edge of arrow) and a line at a 45 degree angle (right edge of arrow) was easier to do and more recognizable than the straight cursor.


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