Stuart Card

Who they are

Card is a researcher in human-computer interaction. The Why We Project cites him for one paper. The account of that paper below is limited to what it reports, and the career details that follow come from a Computer History Museum profile.

Key papers

Card, English and Burr (1978), Evaluation of mouse, rate-controlled isometric joystick, step keys, and text keys for text selection on a CRT, Ergonomics, volume 21, issue 8. The paper compares four ways of selecting text on a display: a mouse, a rate-controlled isometric joystick, step keys and text keys.

Key ideas

The authors reported that the mouse was fastest on all measures and had the lowest error rates of the four devices. Positioning times for the mouse and the joystick fitted Fitts's law. The slope constant for the mouse was close to values found in other eye-hand tasks, which the authors took to suggest that its positioning time was nearly the minimum achievable. For the key-based devices, positioning time was proportional to the number of keystrokes required.

The paper is cited in the article What is Fitts's law? as the point at which the law, first reported by Paul Fitts in 1954, was applied to the comparison of computer pointing devices.

Career and honours

A Computer History Museum profile describes Card as a Xerox Research Fellow who managed the User Interface Research group at the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center, and as an adjunct faculty member at Stanford University. The profile gives no dates for these roles. It lists a physics degree from Oberlin College and a doctorate in psychology from Carnegie Mellon University, taken through an interdisciplinary programme that spanned psychology, artificial intelligence and computer science.

The profile says his study of input devices led to a Fitts's law characterization of the mouse, and names that work as a major factor in the commercial introduction of the mouse by Xerox. It credits his research group with the Model Human Processor, the GOMS theory of user interaction, information foraging theory and statistical descriptions of Internet use, and says the group's work supported about a dozen products, among them contributions to the Xerox Star. It also records that he helped found three software companies, Inxight Software, Outride and Content Guard.

The profile lists him as an ACM Fellow, a member of the ACM CHI Academy and the first recipient of the CHI Achievement Award. He is co-author of The Psychology of Human-Computer Interaction, co-editor of Human Performance Models for Computer-Aided Engineering, and, with Jock Mackinlay and Ben Shneiderman, co-writer and co-editor of Readings in Information Visualization. The article What is Fitts's law? relies only on the 1978 paper. The career details here come from the museum profile alone.

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