How Good Is Your Aim?

weirdly accurate.

How Good Is Your Aim?

How good is my aim?

An aim test is only fair if it counts speed and accuracy together, and pointing research does that with one number: throughput, in bits per second, under the ISO 9241-9 standard. In studies that followed that standard, mice scored between 3.7 and 4.9 bits/s (Soukoreff & MacKenzie, 2004, nine studies), and fingers tapping a phone screen scored about 6.95 bits/s in one study of 16 people (MacKenzie, 2015). This test gives you your own throughput and sets it beside those ranges.

Fireflies land one at a time in a meadow at dusk, and you tap each as it lights. There are four levels of five, each with one size and one distance, smaller and farther apart as you go — about 1.1 to 2.9 bits of difficulty for a finger and 1.7 to 4.7 for a mouse. Each level starts with an untimed firefly that only sets your starting point, as in the standard. Every tap ends a trial, hit or miss. From where your taps land along each movement, the effective width is 4.133 times their spread (corrected for small samples), difficulty is log₂(distance ÷ width + 1), and dividing by your time gives throughput for each level; your score is the average of the four.

There is no population table for this, so the result is not a ranking — the published ranges come from long lab sessions with other target layouts, and a run of 20 taps varies by about a tenth from one try to the next. A mouse and a finger are scored separately, because fingers score higher. Pointer acceleration changes the mouse number and trackpads usually score lower. It is not a medical or motor-skills assessment.

What the test measures

One thing: how much pointing your hand gets done per second, speed and accuracy in one currency.

The task

  • A Fitts’ law pointing task: tap each firefly the moment it lights; the next one is already glowing where it will land
  • Four levels of five timed fireflies, each level one size and one distance, from big and close to small and far
  • An untimed firefly opens every level and sets the start point, as in ISO 9241-9
  • A miss still ends the trial and only widens your spread; taps far from any firefly, and pauses over 3 s, are left out

Your result

  • Your effective throughput in bits per second
  • Set beside the published mouse range (3.7–4.9 bits/s) or the finger figure (6.95 bits/s), depending on what you used
  • A verdict on every tap: dead centre, hit, near or off, which way, how many milliseconds, faster or slower than the last
  • Where all your taps landed on one big firefly, with the ellipse of your spread, plus your misses, time per firefly and Fitts’ slope
  • A shareable card and a challenge link that tells your friend whether you used a mouse or a finger

Before you start

  • About a minute; free, no sign-up
  • A phone with one finger, or a computer with a mouse; a trackpad works but usually scores lower
  • Don’t rotate or resize mid-run: the fireflies are placed for the screen you started on
  • Your taps are scored in your browser; a challenge link carries your score after the # in the address

Aim and pointing FAQ

Is this test free? Do I need to sign up to see my result?

Yes, it’s free, and there’s nothing to sign up for: no account, no email, no payment. Your result appears on this page the moment you finish, and you can share it or play again straight away.

What is a good score on an aim test?

On this aim test, a mouse in the 3.7–4.9 bits/s range is where ISO 9241-9 studies have found mice (Soukoreff & MacKenzie, 2004), and a finger near 6.95 bits/s matches the one touchscreen study (MacKenzie, 2015: 6.39 on a two-dimensional task, 7.52 on a one-dimensional one). These are reference points from small lab samples, not a population ranking.

What is Fitts’ law?

Fitts’ law says pointing at a target takes longer the farther away and the smaller it is, in proportion to log₂(distance ÷ width + 1). Paul Fitts borrowed the idea from information theory in 1954, which is why difficulty is measured in bits and pointing performance in bits per second.

Why doesn’t a miss cost me a point?

Because accuracy is already in the throughput. Each miss widens the spread of your landing points, which makes the effective target width larger and the effective difficulty lower, so a little sloppiness is traded against speed instead of being punished outright. That is how ISO 9241-9 puts speed and accuracy in one number.

Why do fingers score higher than a mouse?

A finger lands directly on the target, with no cursor to steer and no mouse gain in between. In the published studies, touch on a phone came out around 6.95 bits/s against 3.7–4.9 for mice, so this test compares a mouse run only with mice and a finger run only with fingers.

Does mouse sensitivity change my aim score?

Yes. Pointer speed, and especially acceleration, changes how far your hand moves for each pixel on screen, and so the throughput. Trackpads usually score lower than mice. Distances and sizes here are measured in screen pixels, as in the studies, so compare runs on the same setup.

Is this an aim trainer?

No, it is a one-minute measurement rather than a training routine. Twenty timed taps is a short version of the lab method: the same person’s score moves by about a tenth from one run to the next, so a few runs tell you more than one, and small differences between them are noise.

Where the numbers come from

There is no population distribution for this task, so the result is not ranked; it is shown beside the published ranges for mice and for fingers. The site does not publish its own players’ data.

How throughput is worked out

Index of difficulty

log₂(distance ÷ width + 1), in bits. A target is harder the smaller and the farther away it is.

Effective width

4.133 × the standard deviation of your landing points along the movement axis, divided by c4(5) because five taps understate a spread. It is the target size your hand really fitted, so aiming loosely makes the targets effectively bigger.

Throughput

Effective difficulty divided by movement time, for each level; the score is the mean of the four level means, the ISO 9241-9 method used by the studies cited below.