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Investigating the effectiveness of tactile feedback for mobile touchscreens

Published: 06 April 2008 Publication History

Abstract

This paper presents a study of finger-based text entry for mobile devices with touchscreens. Many devices are now coming to market that have no physical keyboards (the Apple iPhone being a very popular example). Touchscreen keyboards lack any tactile feedback and this may cause problems for entering text and phone numbers. We ran an experiment to compare devices with a physical keyboard, a standard touchscreen and a touchscreen with tactile feedback added. We tested this in both static and mobile environments. The results showed that the addition of tactile feedback to the touchscreen significantly improved finger-based text entry, bringing it close to the performance of a real physical keyboard. A second experiment showed that higher specification tactile actuators could improve performance even further. The results suggest that manufacturers should use tactile feedback in their touchscreen devices to regain some of the feeling lost when interacting on a touchscreen with a finger.

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    cover image ACM Conferences
    CHI '08: Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
    April 2008
    1870 pages
    ISBN:9781605580111
    DOI:10.1145/1357054
    Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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    Published: 06 April 2008

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    Author Tags

    1. fingertip interaction
    2. mobile interaction
    3. multimodal interaction
    4. tactile feedback
    5. touchscreens

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    • (2024)Enhancing Touch Circular Knob with Haptic Feedback when Performing Another Saturating Attention Primary TaskProceedings of the 2024 International Conference on Advanced Visual Interfaces10.1145/3656650.3656656(1-9)Online publication date: 3-Jun-2024
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