Brian Meyer
Felipe Othick
Reference Information
Tomer Moscovich, UIST’09, October 4–7, 2009, Victoria, British Columbia, Canada.
Summary
This paper discusses the current situation in tablet computing input. The problem with current setups are the fact that the finger input maps to a pixel rather than the area under the finger. They coin this term the "fat finger problem". This accounts for many errors by the user when using any touch screen device. The author proposes to solve this by having the selection area be the small circle of the finger tip. Now any object in this area will respond to touch. In the article many different situations are proposed in order to show how a sliding widget interface can work well, be intuitive, and help the user. The trials that this system were put through did actually show a slight improvement in both time spent and the amount of errors the user caused.
Discussion
I have a problem with the authors initial proposal of having the finger tip area get a response from all near objects. This seems like a nightmare of frustration with users as they are only trying to manipulate one object but instead all the objects move. This is solved by the author in regard to action buttons by making everything need a sliding action to activate. So objects close to each other can be made to slide in opposite directions in order to not clash with each other. However, this was found to confuse the user slightly and might need to be reworked or thought of before setting the final design. The idea of this is a good one however. Deciding where a large finger is exactly pointing is hard and will probably cause problems for the user. Therefore just using the area is a logical solution.
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| Notice the widgets all require a sliding motion to activate |
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