Investigating the effectiveness of tactile feedback for mobile touchscreens

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 fingerbased 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. Aut...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2008
• Where: CHI
• Authors: Eve E. Hoggan, Stephen A. Brewster, Jody Johnston
• Keywords: CHI 2008, Human Computer Interaction, Keywords Tactile Feedback, Specification Tactile Actuators, Tactile Feedback