Is there any research available about the speed of working with a mouse vs. working with a trackpad?

Question

I ask this because of a friend who never hooks up a mouse to his laptop because he claims he can work just as fast with a trackpad as with a mouse.

My personal experience is the other way around. I find that using the trackpad slows me down because of its inherent lack of precision. Also, moving the cursor seems slower (even when I increase the sensitivity) than with a mouse.

Are there any studies done on this subject matter which are available online?

Answer 1

Here are a couple:

• Performance evaluation of input devices in trajectory-based tasks: an application of the steering law.

In it they discuss the difficulties in measuring across devices and tasks, develop a model to enable cross-device measurement, then give some results on small target tasks. They did find that both mouse and trackpad were top performers compared to other types. Looking at the pictures, trackpads have changed a lot since this study was done.

And the most directly applicable paper I found:

• How age affects pointing with mouse and touchpad: A comparison of young, adult, and elderly users.

Here's a snippet from the conclusion:

Across age groups participants complete pointing movements more quickly and accurately with the mouse than the touchpad, but the touchpad also increases the differences between age groups. Compared to the mouse, the touchpad slows down elderly participants, and to some extent young participants, more than adult participants.

Those papers and others came up via Google Scholar searches for:

• user touchpad|trackpad mouse task performance
• user input devices tasks.

Answer 2

@DA01 is right in the sense that it's context-specific, and I would also argue it's up to personal preference. There's a tiny bit of research on it (Shanis & Hedge, 2003 - abstract only) which shows that, yes, the mouse is better at certain tasks.

I think the hard part here is finding participants that have equal experience with multiple input methods and/or controlling for that. Almost everyone starts their computer use experience with a mouse (although, kids these days are probably gonna be more apt to use a touchscreen/pad), so there're inherent practice effects with any of these studies.

There's a handful of interesting work in combining the mouse with touchpad-esque functionality, allowing the precision/speed of a mouse and the bandwidth of multi-touch gestures.