Drag-and-Drop vs. Point-and-Click Mouse Interaction for Children

This paper presents the results of a study on girls' and boys' usage of two common mouse interaction techniques. The two techniques, drag-and-drop and point-and-click, were compared to determine whether one method was superior to the other in terms of speed, error rate, and preference. For girls, significant differences between the two methods were found for speed, error rate and preference. Point-and-click was faster, fewer errors were committed, and it was preferred over drag-and-drop. For boys, a significant difference was found for speed but not for error rate or preference. Point-and-click was faster than drag-and-drop, the errors rates were comparable and, although more boys preferred point-and-click, the difference was not significant.