Touch Usability

Jitouch gestures for macbook and magic mouse

Jitouch is an impressive looking suite of gestures to add to your MacBook or Apple Magic Mouse. I haven't tested it out, but I'm impressed with the attention to detail evident from the web site, particularly in how they've documented the gestures.

Link: Jitouch. (Via ignore the code.)

MOTO's simple touchscreen stress test

MOTO labs has posted a good article discussing touchscreen accuracy. They describe a simple line-drawing test you can do on touchscreens: DIY Touchscreen analysis. The basic ideas is to slowly draw diagonal lines in a drawing program, and then watch how linear the result is. They also look at edge performance.

Of course this is just one part of the picture -- there are other measures of accuracy and responsiveness (this doesn't say much about touch-down/lift-off accuracy, for instance). And as MOTO points out, the touch sensor is just one factor among many that contributes to quality. They sum up with some dos and don'ts:

MOTO has worked with capacitive touch interfaces for more than 15 years, and here are some essential dos and don’ts for anyone entering the field:

• Don’t skimp on materials. With touchscreen hardware, manufacturers get what they pay for — and consumers will notice the difference.
• Allow ample time to develop your algorithms. Don’t treat touchscreen algorithms as an element of component sourcing; for best results, create a distinct touch development track under your own roof to make sure your products are both responsive and accurate.
• Closely integrate touchscreen hardware, software, and user interaction development, and do so as early as possible in the product development process. Never treat them as separate tasks.

Link: DIY Touchscreen analysis (via Engadget).

International Research Study about Touch Gestures

Several usability companies under the banner of International Usability Partners have conducted a major user research study about touchscreen gestures in different cultures. The research was presented at the recent Human Factors and Ergonomics Society conference among other places. Dan Mauney of HumanCentric is blogging about the study at HumanCentric's blog. So far the posts have presented the background and test protocols. Future posts will report on the results. From the first post:

Very few studies appear in the literature on the identification and understandability of gestures on touchscreens.  It is truly an emerging convention. Even fewer, and perhaps even none, have studied the identification and understandability of gestures across cultures.  Yet, many of the products that enable gestures will be intended for a global audience.  Designers have a definite need to know how understandable gestures are, and how universal they are, while the field is still young.

The International Usability Partners (IUP) has run a global study aimed at identifying the most common user-generated gestures for control of a touchscreen within a given country and across cultures.  The (IUP) is an established network of 12 independent usability companies based in 12 different countries (including Belgium, China, Chile, Finland, France, Germany, India, Italy, Spain, Sweden, UK, and USA) who have joined  to provide user experience services worldwide. This research involved collecting user-defined gestures for 28 common commands (like scroll, open, rotate, zoom in, cut, copy, paste) across 9 different countries and analyzing the resultant data for consistency of responses and cultural influence. 40 participants in each country were presented with a “before” screen image and an “after” screen image and requested to make a gesture that will result in that “after” screen image. The gesture made was recorded and catalogued.

Link to all the posts: Gesture Research.

It's very interesting work and I'm looking forward to reading all the results.

IUP also has a new group blog on this theme: TouchThinking.

Bill Buxton on the Mad Dash Toward Touch Technology

Interrupting my blog neglect to point you to this must-read column by Bill Buxton: The Mad Dash Toward Touch Technology. He offers a good dose of realism and some thoughts about true innovation.

iPhone App Heuristics

Suzanne Ginsburg is adapting Jakob Nielsen's usability heuristics to the new world of iPhone apps: iPhone App Usability Heuristics. It's a work in progress and she invites suggestions.

Report from Workshop on Touch Affordances

The organizers have posted a report summarizing the one-day Workshop on Touch Affordances that was held with Interact 2009: Workshop overview report.

Comparing iPhone and Android HTC Magic Touchscreen Keyboards

This is an excellent, detailed comparison by Lucas Mathis of the soft keyboard implementations on the iPhone and the HTC Magic running Android: Virtual Keyboards on iPhone and Android.

Lucas also has some other good posts on his blog about virtual keyboards.

Article about iPhone's new accessibility features

A great article about the little-advertised but very impressive accessibility features Apple has added to the new iPhone: My first experience using an accessible touch screen device (Marco's Accessibility Blog).

Marko writes mostly about the new voice over features. There is also a zoom feature and white-on-black color mode.

Kudos to Apple for putting serious effort into accessibility and (again) being way ahead of the pack.

ThinkPad W700ds with dual touch and related thoughts

Darren Rowse at the site Digital Photography School posted a review of Lenovo's ThinkPad W700ds notebook. You may not recognize the model number but you've probably seen a photo of it -- it's the beast with two screens and a built-in Wacom digitizing tablet.

Link: Lenovo ThinkPad W700ds review.

I haven't tried this machine but I've been curious about what users think of it so I enjoyed reading Darren's review. It prompted a few thoughts about touchpad size and the palm-rest area:

"the touchpad really is small"

Yesterday's touchpads are small. The one on the W700ds looks like a standard pre-2008 (or so) touchpad that measures a little under 60 mm wide by 40 mm high. MacBooks now have trackpads that are about 100 mm x 75 mm and even Windows machines are getting up there, like Lenovo's Ideapad Y650 which has a 104 mm x 64 mm touchpad. (Shown below with home keys and touchpad highlighted -- ignore the orange lines please. The images are from Lenovo's site)

  

Bigger is better for any kind of multifinger gestures and people seem to like the extra space for pointing as well. But it has its disadvantages. The biggest problem is that you're much more likely to accidentally touch it when you're typing. This is especially likely if the touchpad is not centered to the keyboard. Unfortunately the Y650 is centered to the palmrest. That may be more aesthetically pleasing, but it means your right hand very often brushes the touchpad. When it does the cursor moves and scrolling gets activated if you brush the scroll-zone on the right side. (Touchpad drivers generally have some algorithms built in to filter out accidental touches but they're not perfect.)

Back to the W700ds, which has a Wacom tablet right where you might rest your hand. It isn't sensitive to finger input so there's no risk of accidental input, but users may still not like it. Darren writes:

"at times it felt ‘wrong’ to have my right wrist leaning against it as I typed as it is placed directly in front of the keyboard area."

That observation makes me wonder whether we shouldn't just leave the palmrests for the palms. Nevertheless, I'm very interested in what you could do with huge touchpads covering the palmrests. (And lots of other people have thought about this previously too.) Here's a mockup:



To my thinking there is a benefit in dividing the touchpad into two regions, one for each hand. The dividing line could either be real or imaginary -- there could just be two touchpads side-by-side or there could be one wide touchpad with a virtual invisible dividing line.

Two-handed input has been the subject of a lot of HCI research that argues that we'd have better user interfaces if we did a better job of balancing the interactions across both hands (see for example Mackenzie and Guiard, 2001).

Much of that research builds on Yves Guiard's kinematic chain model that says (approximately) that people often use their two hands in concert like two links in a chain. The dominant hand is like the bottom link and does finer manipulations, while the non-dominant hand is like the top link and frames what the other hand does. A common illustration of this is handwriting: people tend to use both hands when writing on paper -- one hand to write and the other to continually reposition the paper.

There are some possible dual-touchpad interaction techniques that are analogous to this. For example, you might have a mode where the left touchpad allows scrolling and panning while the right allows pointing (for right-handed users). Bill Buxton and others have shown that even though users are still not likely to scroll and point in parallel, the interface is more efficient because of a cognitive benefit in splitting the tasks across the hands (see Leganchuk et al., 1998).

Another asymmetric technique that you could implement on dual touchpads is the Toolglass technique (see Bier et al., 1993) where the left hand positions a toolbox and the right hand selects tools from it.

Some gestures also might work better with two hands instead of one (see Moscovich 2008 for an experiment on this). Scaling an image is likely to be done more precisely with two index fingers than with the thumb and finger on one hand.

I'm hoping to set up a dual-touchpad prototype and test some of these ideas. I welcome any comments... Would you buy a laptop with two touchpads?

Mind-Mapping on a Touch Surface

Mindflow is a student project by Toni Da Luz that supports collaborative creation of mind-maps.

Toni's site has a couple of nice video demonstrations, including this one that shows the idea in animated paper prototype form. The narration is in French but it's still fairly easy to follow if you're like me and don't remember any French from school.

mindflow [work in progress] from Toni Da Luz on Vimeo.