Breaking Fitts’s Law is about the world behind cripplingly bad design. The main character, Martin, is a user interface designer at a software company who works with a strange band of characters while trying desperately to make their products almost not suck.

What is Fitts’s Law?

Fitts’s law is a tenet of interaction design that describes the adequate placement and visibility of target controls based on their importance to the user at any given time. Written by Paul Fitts as model of human interaction with physical object in the world around them, Fitts’s Law is now recognized (mostly) and adapted to concepts in user interface design for software.

From Bruce ‘Tog’ Tognazinni’s article on the Principles of User Experience Design
Principle: The time to acquire a target is a function of the distance to and size of the target.

In simpler terms, “Don’t put the self-destruct button in the top left corner of the screen, obscuring every other action.”  It’s also why self destruct buttons are put behind a glass cover, somewhere farther away from your reach than anything else, hopefully out of your direct line of sight.

Want to know more about Fitts’s Law? Check out this wonderful article by Bruce ‘Tog’ Tognazinni.

Still not enough? Here’s what the the Interaction Design Foundation has to say about Paul Fitts and his grand assertion.

Why is Fitts’s Law spelled that way?

Somewhere there’s an obscure grammar rule regarding the possessive form of a proper name ending with the letter ‘s’.

Disclaimer

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.