Steering Wheel or Driving Wheel: Which Way is Up?

P. Grew (Italy)


devices and display systems, tools, and interaction tech niques; graphical user interfaces; non-verbal interfaces; metaphor; mouse scrollwheel.


Many functions other than scrolling may be mapped onto the wheel of the computer mouse. These include zooming, in browsers or viewers, and controlling the volume, in au dio applications. Competing applications designed for ac complishing the same task, listening to audio ﬁles or read ing webpages, for example, require that the scrollwheel be turned in opposite directions to achieve the same effect. This paper argues that the two opposite grammatical rules applied in designing the application interfaces actually re ﬂect different underlying metaphorical concepts. The rules of interface grammar may be in ﬂux or competing dialects may assign different semantic values to the same mouse wheel gesture

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