Glass+Skin: An Empirical Evaluation of the Added Value of Finger Identification to Basic Single-Touch Interaction on Touch Screens

TL;DR

This study evaluates how finger identification can expand command vocabularies on touch screens, improving efficiency and usability for small devices by allowing more commands without multi-touch, through empirical testing and performance analysis.

Contribution

It provides an empirical assessment of finger identification's benefits for single-touch command expansion and introduces a throughput measure based on Shannon's theory for performance evaluation.

Findings

Finger identification significantly increases command vocabulary size.

Larger vocabularies benefit more from finger identification.

Throughput analysis offers a comprehensive performance metric.

Abstract

The usability of small devices such as smartphones or interactive watches is often hampered by the limited size of command vocabularies. This paper is an attempt at better understanding how finger identification may help users invoke commands on touch screens, even without recourse to multi-touch input. We describe how finger identification can increase the size of input vocabularies under the constraint of limited real estate, and we discuss some visual cues to communicate this novel modality to novice users. We report a controlled experiment that evaluated, over a large range of input-vocabulary sizes, the efficiency of single-touch command selections with vs. without finger identification. We analyzed the data not only in terms of traditional time and error metrics, but also in terms of a throughput measure based on Shannon's theory, which we show offers a synthetic and parsimonious account of users' performance. The results show that the larger the input vocabulary needed by the designer, the more promising the identification of individual fingers.