Alyssa Nabors
Chris Kam
Reference Information
Daniel Wigdor, Sarah Williams, Michael Cronin, Robert Levy, Katie White, Maxim Mazeev, Hrvoje Benko, Microsoft, UIST’09, October 4–7, 2009, Victoria, British Columbia, Canada.
Summary
This paper is on the topic of the recent trend of multi-touch input displays that have been starting to sell on electronics. These types of inputs have become very popular, but unfortunately the feedback to users has taken a step back. Often times an irregular result will come out of a particular action and cause the user confusion. This, however, is not accompanied by any sort of visual feedback in order for the user to figure out exactly what their mistake was. Ripple is a new program from these authors that provides the users with appropriate feedback through contact visualization to show correct operations and errors. Ripple is a way of standardizing this solution to a problem that will become prevalent as the products keep coming out. The program is friendly enough to be able to become implemented in different platforms by being the system level framework that renders visuals above all other layers. The whole point to the Ripple framework is to bring together a standard so users everywhere can easily pick up these devices and be able to use them with ease and fewer errors just like the mouse and keyboard.
Discussion
This topic is a very important aspect of computing as time goes on. The multi-touch screen is a huge new piece of hardware that will be frequently used in the coming future and I think that the biggest problem that it still faces is the annoyance with dealing with user input errors. People get frustrated because they do not realize what problems they are doing because no feedback is given. When devices freeze and the user continually tries to push a button on screen and it will not respond is often a problem and the user is receiving no feedback that the device is no understanding the input. However, a simple act of adding in vibration after every 'click' has not been accepted and is often turned off by the user. This will be a very important topic in human computer interaction realm for the coming years.
The topic of this paper sounds very interesting and seems to raise an issue that will inevitably have to be dealt with. I wonder though how replacing the traditional haptic feedback wth visual feedback would avoid the user getting frustrated.
ReplyDeleteI agree that feedback in touch controlled interfaces is a huge problem, and I also agree that traditional haptic feedback is sub-optimal. It simply does not provide realistic feedback. One thing that I do not agree on though, is that a standard for visualizing feedback is the answer. It will be up to developers to adopt it, and ultimately what people want is physical feedback anyway.
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