38 · Doing
Steering Law
Moving a pointer along a narrow path takes longer the longer and narrower the path is.
Evidence: Holds upWhat we do with it
- 01
Hover menus are narrow tunnels. Give submenus room, and a short delay before they close.
- 02
Prefer a click to a hover where you can. A menu that opens on click doesn't punish a shaky hand.
- 03
Sliders and drag handles need wide tracks, especially on touch screens.
Examples
Getting it wrong, getting it right.
Don't
A cascading menu that closes the moment the cursor slips one pixel outside the row on its way to the submenu.
Do
The same menu reads the direction the cursor is moving and holds the submenu open while it travels toward it.
The evidence
What the research says.
Johnny Accot and Shumin Zhai's model predicted steering times closely in their experiments, and it has since been used to model menus and drawing tasks. David Ahlström used it in 2005 to model cascading menus and showed that menus which gently pull the pointer along the path cut selection time by 18% on average. Masatomo Kobayashi and Takeo Igarashi showed in 2003 that a menu which reads the direction the cursor is moving, and holds the submenu open while it travels, is faster and stops submenus flickering open and shut.
Sources
- Accot, J., & Zhai, S. (1997). Beyond Fitts' law: Models for trajectory-based HCI tasks. CHI '97.
- Kobayashi, M., & Igarashi, T. (2003). Considering the direction of cursor movement for efficient traversal of cascading menus. UIST '03.
- Ahlström, D. (2005). Modeling and improving selection in cascading pull-down menus using Fitts' law, the steering law and force fields. CHI '05.
Last reviewed November 7, 2026. How we keep this current