Curseur Tangible et Déformable sur Dispositifs Mobiles pour Interagir à une Main sans Regarder l’Écran / Deformable Tangible Slider for Eyes-Free One-Handed Thumb Interaction on Mobile Devices
In 29ème conférence francophone sur l'Interaction Homme-Machine, IHM 2017, Poitiers, France, ACM. pages 21-31. 2017.
Juan Pablo Rosso Pirela, Céline Coutrix, Matt Jones, Laurence Nigay
Abstract
Graphical sliders are widely used on mobile devices. However, with a single hand, reaching for far values is difficult: users change their grip and can drop the device. Moreover, sliders require visual attention to operate them. Envisioning mobile devices that dynamically extend tangible sliders out of the screen, the contribution of this work is a first attempt to experimentally study a deformable tangible slider that facilitate thumb interaction on mobile devices. The deformable tangible slider expands its cursor (Figure 1) to avoid hand-grip changes by maintaining the thumb within its comfortable area. Moreover, its tangible aspect allows eyes-free interaction. We first compared a low-fidelity prototype with a classic tangible slider. The prototype improves performance by 9.2% when targets are outside the thumb’s comfortable area. We then designed a deformable slider that we compared to a classic tangible slider and a graphical one. Though the deformable slider is globally faster (14.3%) than the classic tangible one, the difference is not significant. While the graphical slider performs faster, the deformable tangible slider offers eyes-free interaction and stable hand-grip.