Side pressure for bidirectional navigation on small devices

Abstract

Virtual navigation on a mobile touchscreen is usually performed using finger gestures: drag and flick to scroll or pan, pinch to zoom. While easy to learn and perform, these gestures cause significant occlusion of the display. They also require users to explicitly switch between navigation mode and edit mode to either change the viewport's position in the document, or manipulate the actual content displayed in that viewport, respectively. SidePress augments mobile devices with two continuous pressure sensors co-located on one of their sides. It provides users with generic bidirectional navigation capabilities at different levels of granularity, all seamlessly integrated to act as an alternative to traditional navigation techniques, including scrollbars, drag-and-flick, or pinch-to-zoom. We describe the hardware prototype, detail the associated interaction vocabulary for different applications, and report on two laboratory studies. The first shows that users can precisely and efficiently control SidePress; the second, that SidePress can be more efficient than drag-andflick touch gestures when scrolling large documents.

An Evaluation of Input Controls for In-Car Interactions

“…[1,13,14,22,23,25]) but little is known about the effectiveness of pressure for in-car interactions. In our first experiment, positional and rate-based controls [25], two common pressure input techniques, were investigated along with pressure-based buttons using a driving simulator.…”

Pinch-drag-flick vs. spatial input

“…Besides that, ambiguities of gestures may trigger unintended actions, such as the accidental selection of items, or may require users to explicitly switch between edit and navigation mode, which in turn may induce disorientation [17]. These shortcomings motivated the development of navigation techniques that, for example, employ different finger gestures [2] or extend the interaction to the side [23] or the back of devices [29]. Although such approaches soften some of the issues of Pinch-Drag-Flick, the underlying input strategy still remains surface-constrained and thus continues to rely mostly on fine finger motor skills.…”

An Evaluation of Touch and Pressure-Based Scrolling and Haptic Feedback for In-Car Touchscreens

“…Research has also looked at the use of pressure-based input with mobile phones for side-ofdevice interactions (e.g. Hoggan et al [11] and Spelmezan et al [28]). These results were obtained for handheld devices but pressure input is less well studied with in-car touchscreen scrolling interfaces where extra vibrations, movements and forces from a moving vehicle may affect input and driving performance in different ways to nondriving contexts.…”