Haptic devices are now commercially available and thus touch has become a potentially realistic solution to a variety of interaction design challenges. We report on an investigation of the use of touch as a way of reducing visual overload in the conventional desktop. In a two-phase study, we investigated the use of the PHANToM haptic device as a means of interacting with a conventional graphical user interface. The first experiment compared the effects of four different haptic augmentations on usability in a simple targeting task. The second experiment involved a more ecologically-oriented searching and scrolling task. Results indicated that the haptic effects did not improve users performance in terms of task completion time. However, the number of errors made was significantly reduced. Subjective workload measures showed that participants perceived many aspects of workload as significantly less with haptics. The results are described and the implications for the use of haptics in user interface design are discussed.

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This paper explores uses and gratifications of a content community on a social network service -a music video sharing group on Facebook. In a two-stage study, 20 users first generated words or phrases to describe how they used the group, and what they enjoyed about their use. These phrases were coded into 34 questionnaire items that were then completed by 57 new participants. Factor analysis on this data revealed four gratifications: contribution; discovery; social interaction and entertainment. These factors are interpreted and discussed, leading to design implications and guidelines aimed at informing the design of future online services that combine media sharing with social interaction to create online systems based on a rich and meaningful object-centered sociality.

While haptic feedback has been shown to enhance user performance and satisfaction in single target interactions in desktop user interfaces, it is not clear whether this will hold for more realistic, multi-target interactions. Here we present an experimental study of haptically enhanced menus. We evaluate a visual condition, a haptic condition and an adjusted haptic condition designed to support menu interactions. We conclude that thoughtful design can create multi-target haptic augmentations that provide performance benefits.

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Haptic feedback has been shown to improve user performance in Graphical User Interface (GUI) targeting tasks in a number of studies. These studies have typically focused on interactions with individual targets, and it is unclear whether the performance increases reported will generalise to the more realistic situation where multiple targets are presented simultaneously. This paper addresses this issue in two ways. Firstly two empirical studies dealing with groups of haptically augmented widgets are presented. These reveal that haptic augmentations of complex widgets can reduce performance, although carefully designed feedback can result in performance improvements. The results of these studies are then used in conjunction with the previous literature to generate general design guidelines for the creation of haptic widgets.