When you’re driving down the freeway and your favorite song comes on the radio, I bet you can reach out and adjust the volume knob without ever taking your eyes off the road: your muscle memory kicks in, and you instinctively know where to reach without even looking. This is a practical demonstration of Fitts’ Law.
Today I want to share a tip along these lines, which brings this ease to the volume knob in Windows. It seems like such a small thing, but small things matter, good and bad. Let’s take a look at what steps a user would perform if they needed to adjust the volume.
Old (Windows 95 onward)
- Find the pointer arrow cursor on the screen.
- Move the cursor down to the taskbar tray and carefully position it over the tiny speaker icon.
- Click it.
- Move your pointer again and position it on the volume slider.
- Click and drag to adjust your volume.
- Click back to the program you were using.
Better (added in Windows 11)
- Find the pointer arrow cursor on the screen.
- Move the cursor down to the taskbar tray and carefully position it over the tiny speaker icon.
- Scroll your mouse wheel up and down to adjust volume.
- Click back to the program you were using.
Best
- Reach out and swipe your touchpad.
This works regardless of where your pointer arrow is on the screen, or which program is active. You don’t ever leave what you were doing so there’s no switching back. No locating, aiming, clicking, re-aiming… nothing. Just reach out and adjust the volume almost identically to an actual hardware volume knob. It never moves, so just extend your arm and adjust the volume, the same as you do when driving your car.
Assuming you have a precision touchpad, this volume gesture can be set from Settings > System > Bluetooth & Devices > Touchpad. You can assign it to either 3 or 4 finger swipes (swiping with two fingers is already the longtime standard for scrolling).
