Participatory Design of a Computer Mouse

Intensive use of the computer mouse is associated with an increased risk of musculoskeletal disorders. Due to prolonged use of the mouse with a wrist posture that deviated from its relaxed posture, users may experience fatigue, discomfort, and even pain on the wrist and hand. Both size and shape of the mouse can be a cause of this associated discomfort. In this work, we have followed a participatory-design approach to propose a design concept and develop a vertical pointing device prototype that offers a comfortable right-handed grip that resembles the relaxed hand posture. This work aims to understand user participation during the design process and how their involvement helped evolve the device concept that enables comfortable grip and novel interaction opportunities. We started the participatory design process using clay mockups to finalize the initial shape. After finalizing the initial shape, we made further modifications based on user feedback. After two iterations, we completed the design and conducted a user study to investigate perceived comfort and pressure on the wrist. We found that the grip on the device was comfortable for participants with medium and large hand sizes, and the majority of them reported no pressure on the wrist. The device allows users to keep their hands in a more ergonomically desired posture. It offers novel interaction modalities as an alternative to the button-based controls of a typical computer mouse. We believe this work will help interaction designers and researchers design ergonomic pointing devices enabling multimodal input interaction.