research-article

Computing Touch-Point Ambiguity on Mobile Touchscreens for Modeling Target Selection Times

Authors:

Shota Yamanaka,

Hiroki UsubaAuthors Info & Claims

Proceedings of the ACM on Interactive, Mobile, Wearable and Ubiquitous Technologies, Volume 5, Issue 4

Article No.: 186, Pages 1 - 21

https://doi.org/10.1145/3494976

Published: 30 December 2021 Publication History

Abstract

Finger-Fitts law (FFitts law) is a model to predict touch-pointing times, modified from Fitts' law. It considers the absolute touch-point precision, or a finger tremor factor σa, to decrease the admissible target area and thus increase the task difficulty. Among choices such as running an independent task or performing parameter optimization, there is no consensus on the best methodology to measure σa. This inconsistency could be detrimental to HCI studies such as pointing technique evaluations and user group comparisons. By integrating the results of our 1D and 2D touch-pointing experiments and reanalyses of previous studies' data, we examined the advantages and disadvantages of each approach to compute σa. We found that the parameter optimization method is a suboptimal choice for predicting the performance.

References

[1]

Bashar I. Ahmad, Patrick M. Langdon, Simon J. Godsill, Robert Hardy, Lee Skrypchuk, and Richard Donkor. 2015. Touchscreen Usability and Input Performance in Vehicles under Different Road Conditions: An Evaluative Study. In Proceedings of the 7th International Conference on Automotive User Interfaces and Interactive Vehicular Applications (Nottingham, United Kingdom) (AutomotiveUI '15). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 47--54. https://doi.org/10.1145/2799250.2799284

Digital Library

[2]

Hirotugu Akaike. 1974. A new look at the statistical model identification. IEEE Trans. Automat. Control 19, 6 (Dec 1974), 716--723. https://doi.org/10.1109/TAC.1974.1100705

[3]

Gilles Bailly, Antti Oulasvirta, Timo Kötzing, and Sabrina Hoppe. 2013. MenuOptimizer: Interactive Optimization of Menu Systems. In Proceedings of the 26th Annual ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology (St. Andrews, Scotland, United Kingdom) (UIST '13). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 331--342. https://doi.org/10.1145/2501988.2502024

Digital Library

[4]

Joanna Bergstrom-Lehtovirta, Antti Oulasvirta, and Stephen Brewster. 2011. The Effects of Walking Speed on Target Acquisition on a Touchscreen Interface. In Proceedings of the 13th International Conference on Human Computer Interaction with Mobile Devices and Services (Stockholm, Sweden) (MobileHCI '11). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 143--146. https://doi.org/10.1145/2037373.2037396

Digital Library

[5]

Xiaojun Bi, Yang Li, and Shumin Zhai. 2013. FFitts Law: Modeling Finger Touch with Fitts' Law. In Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (Paris, France) (CHI '13). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 1363--1372. https://doi.org/10.1145/2470654.2466180

Digital Library

[6]

Xiaojun Bi and Shumin Zhai. 2013. Bayesian Touch: A Statistical Criterion of Target Selection with Finger Touch. In Proceedings of the 26th Annual ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology (St. Andrews, Scotland, United Kingdom) (UIST '13). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 51--60. https://doi.org/10.1145/2501988.2502058

Digital Library

[7]

Xiaojun Bi and Shumin Zhai. 2016. Predicting Finger-Touch Accuracy Based on the Dual Gaussian Distribution Model. In Proceedings of the 29th Annual Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology (Tokyo, Japan) (UIST '16). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 313--319. https://doi.org/10.1145/2984511.2984546

Digital Library

[8]

Olivier Chapuis and Pierre Dragicevic. 2011. Effects of Motor Scale, Visual Scale, and Quantization on Small Target Acquisition Difficulty. ACM Trans. Comput.-Hum. Interact. 18, 3, Article 13 (Aug. 2011), 32 pages. https://doi.org/10.1145/1993060.1993063

Digital Library

[9]

Andy Cockburn, Carl Gutwin, Philippe Palanque, Yannick Deleris, Catherine Trask, Ashley Coveney, Marcus Yung, and Karon MacLean. 2017. Turbulent Touch: Touchscreen Input for Cockpit Flight Displays. Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 6742--6753. https://doi.org/10.1145/3025453.3025584

Digital Library

[10]

Louise V. Coutts, Katherine L. Plant, Mark Smith, Luke Bolton, Katie J. Parnell, James Arnold, and Neville A. Stanton. 2019. Future technology on the flight deck: assessing the use of touchscreens in vibration environments. Ergonomics 62, 2 (2019), 286--304. https://doi.org/10.1080/00140139.2018.1552013

[11]

Edward R.F.W. Crossman. 1956. The speed and accuracy of simple hand movements. Ph.D. Dissertation. University of Birmingham.

[12]

Peter Dixon. 2008. Models of accuracy in repeated-measures designs. Journal of Memory and Language 59, 4 (2008), 447--456.

[13]

Jan Eggers, Dominique Feillet, Steffen Kehl, Marc Oliver Wagner, and Bernard Yannou. 2003. Optimization of the keyboard arrangement problem using an Ant Colony algorithm. European Journal of Operational Research 148, 3 (2003), 672--686. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0377-2217(02)00489-7

[14]

Paul M. Fitts. 1954. The information capacity of the human motor system in controlling the amplitude of movement. Journal of Experimental Psychology 47, 6 (1954), 381--391. https://doi.org/10.1037/h0055392

[15]

Krzysztof Gajos and Daniel S. Weld. 2004. SUPPLE: Automatically Generating User Interfaces. In Proceedings of the 9th International Conference on Intelligent User Interfaces (Funchal, Madeira, Portugal) (IUI '04). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 93--100. https://doi.org/10.1145/964442.964461

Digital Library

[16]

Julien Gori and Olivier Rioul. 2020. A feedback information-theoretic transmission scheme (FITTS) for modeling trajectory variability in aimed movements. Biological Cybernetics 114, 6 (2020), 621--641. https://doi.org/10.1007/s00422-020-00853-7

[17]

Julien Gori, Olivier Rioul, and Yves Guiard. 2018. Speed-Accuracy Tradeoff: A Formal Information-Theoretic Transmission Scheme (FITTS). ACM Trans. Comput.-Hum. Interact. 25, 5, Article 27 (Sept. 2018), 33 pages. https://doi.org/10.1145/3231595

Digital Library

[18]

Errol R. Hoffmann and Ilyas H. Sheikh. 1994. Effect of varying target height in a Fitts' movement task. Ergonomics 37, 6 (1994), 1071--1088. https://doi.org/10.1080/00140139408963719

[19]

Christian Holz and Patrick Baudisch. 2010. The Generalized Perceived Input Point Model and How to Double Touch Accuracy by Extracting Fingerprints. In Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (Atlanta, Georgia, USA) (CHI '10). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 581--590. https://doi.org/10.1145/1753326.1753413

Digital Library

[20]

Christian Holz and Patrick Baudisch. 2011. Understanding Touch. In Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (Vancouver, BC, Canada) (CHI '11). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 2501--2510. https://doi.org/10.1145/1978942.1979308

Digital Library

[21]

Kaori Ikematsu, Haruna Oshima, Rachel Eardley, and Itiro Siio. 2020. Investigating How Smartphone Movement is Affected by Lying Down Body Posture. Proc. ACM Hum.-Comput. Interact. 4, ISS, Article 192 (Nov. 2020), 17 pages. https://doi.org/10.1145/3427320

Digital Library

[22]

Robert E. Kass and Adrian E. Raftery. 1995. Bayes Factors. J. Amer. Statist. Assoc. 90, 430 (1995), 773--795. https://doi.org/10.1080/01621459.1995.10476572

[23]

Yu-Jung Ko, Hang Zhao, Yoonsang Kim, IV Ramakrishnan, Shumin Zhai, and Xiaojun Bi. 2020. Modeling Two Dimensional Touch Pointing. In Proceedings of the 33rd Annual ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology (Virtual Event, USA) (UIST '20). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 858--868. https://doi.org/10.1145/3379337.3415871

Digital Library

[24]

Min Lin, Rich Goldman, Kathleen J. Price, Andrew Sears, and Julie Jacko. 2007. How do people tap when walking? An empirical investigation of nomadic data entry. International Journal of Human-Computer Studies 65, 9 (2007), 759--769. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijhcs.2007.04.001

Digital Library

[25]

Yuexing Luo and Daniel Vogel. 2014. Crossing-based Selection with Direct Touch Input. In Proceedings of the 32Nd Annual ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (Toronto, Ontario, Canada) (CHI '14). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 2627--2636. https://doi.org/10.1145/2556288.2557397

Digital Library

[26]

I. Scott MacKenzie. 1992. Fitts' law as a research and design tool in human-computer interaction. Human-Computer Interaction 7, 1 (1992), 91--139. https://doi.org/10.1207/s15327051hci0701_3

Digital Library

[27]

I. Scott MacKenzie and William Buxton. 1992. Extending Fitts' Law to Two-dimensional Tasks. In Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (Monterey, California, USA) (CHI '92). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 219--226. https://doi.org/10.1145/142750.142794

Digital Library

[28]

Blanca Mena, M José, Rafael Alarcón, Jaume Arnau Gras, Roser Bono Cabré, and Rebecca Bendayan. 2017. Non-normal data: Is ANOVA still a valid option? Psicothema 29, 4 (2017), 552--557.

[29]

Jeffrey Nichols, Brad A. Myers, and Kevin Litwack. 2004. Improving Automatic Interface Generation with Smart Templates. In Proceedings of the 9th International Conference on Intelligent User Interfaces (Funchal, Madeira, Portugal) (IUI '04). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 286--288. https://doi.org/10.1145/964442.964507

Digital Library

[30]

Halla B. Olafsdottir, Yves Guiard, Olivier Rioul, and Simon T. Perrault. 2012. A New Test of Throughput Invariance in Fitts' Law: Role of the Intercept and of Jensen's Inequality. In Proceedings of the 26th Annual BCS Interaction Specialist Group Conference on People and Computers (Birmingham, United Kingdom) (BCS-HCI '12). BCS Learning & Development Ltd., Swindon, GBR, 119--126.

[31]

R. L. Potter, L. J. Weldon, and B. Shneiderman. 1988. Improving the Accuracy of Touch Screens: An Experimental Evaluation of Three Strategies. In Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (Washington, D.C., USA) (CHI '88). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 27--32. https://doi.org/10.1145/57167.57171

Digital Library

[32]

Bastian Schildbach and Enrico Rukzio. 2010. Investigating Selection and Reading Performance on a Mobile Phone While Walking. In Proceedings of the 12th International Conference on Human Computer Interaction with Mobile Devices and Services (Lisbon, Portugal) (MobileHCI '10). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 93--102. https://doi.org/10.1145/1851600.1851619

Digital Library

[33]

R. William Soukoreff and I. Scott MacKenzie. 2004. Towards a standard for pointing device evaluation, perspectives on 27 years of Fitts' law research in HCI. International Journal of Human-Computer Studies 61, 6 (2004), 751--789. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijhcs.2004.09.001

Digital Library

[34]

Da Tao, Jihong Zeng, Kaifeng Liu, and Xingda Qu. 2021. Effects of control-to-display gain and operation precision requirement on touchscreen operations in vibration environments. Applied Ergonomics 91 (2021), 103293. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.apergo.2020.103293

[35]

Fabian van Noort. 2015. Effect of running on throughput in pointing tasks: a Fitts' law experiment. Master's thesis. Utrecht University.

[36]

Nout C. M. van Zon, Clark Borst, Daan M. Pool, and Marinus M. van Paassen. 2020. Touchscreens for Aircraft Navigation Tasks: Comparing Accuracy and Throughput of Three Flight Deck Interfaces Using Fitts' Law. Human Factors 62, 6 (2020), 897--908. https://doi.org/10.1177/0018720819862146

[37]

Daniel Vogel and Patrick Baudisch. 2007. Shift: A Technique for Operating Pen-Based Interfaces Using Touch. Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 657--666. https://doi.org/10.1145/1240624.1240727

Digital Library

[38]

Alan Travis Welford. 1968. Fundamentals of skill. Methuen Publishing, London, UK.

[39]

Jacob O. Wobbrock, Leah Findlater, Darren Gergle, and James J. Higgins. 2011. The Aligned Rank Transform for Nonparametric Factorial Analyses Using Only Anova Procedures. In Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (Vancouver, BC, Canada) (CHI '11). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 143--146. https://doi.org/10.1145/1978942.1978963

Digital Library

[40]

Jacob O. Wobbrock, Kristen Shinohara, and Alex Jansen. 2011. The Effects of Task Dimensionality, Endpoint Deviation, Throughput Calculation, and Experiment Design on Pointing Measures and Models. In Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (Vancouver, BC, Canada) (CHI '11). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 1639--1648. https://doi.org/10.1145/1978942.1979181

Digital Library

[41]

Julia Woodward, Jahelle Cato, Jesse Smith, Isaac Wang, Brett Benda, Lisa Anthony, and Jaime Ruiz. 2020. Examining Fitts' and FFitts' Law Models for Children's Pointing Tasks on Touchscreens. In Proceedings of the International Conference on Advanced Visual Interfaces (Salerno, Italy) (AVI '20). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, Article 56, 5 pages. https://doi.org/10.1145/3399715.3399844

Digital Library

[42]

Charles E. Wright and Francis Lee. 2013. Issues Related to HCI Application of Fitts's Law. Human-Computer Interaction 28, 6 (2013), 548--578. https://doi.org/10.1080/07370024.2013.803873

[43]

Shota Yamanaka. 2018. Effect of Gaps with Penal Distractors Imposing Time Penalty in Touch-pointing Tasks. In Proceedings of the 20th International Conference on Human-Computer Interaction with Mobile Devices and Services (Barcelona, Spain) (MobileHCI '18). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 8 pages. https://doi.org/10.1145/3229434.3229435

Digital Library

[44]

Shota Yamanaka. 2018. Risk Effects of Surrounding Distractors Imposing Time Penalty in Touch-Pointing Tasks. In Proceedings of the 2018 ACM International Conference on Interactive Surfaces and Spaces (Tokyo, Japan) (ISS '18). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 129--135. https://doi.org/10.1145/3279778.3279781

Digital Library

[45]

Shota Yamanaka and Hiroki Usuba. 2020. Rethinking the Dual Gaussian Distribution Model for Predicting Touch Accuracy in On-Screen-Start Pointing Tasks. Proc. ACM Hum.-Comput. Interact. 4, ISS, Article 205 (Nov. 2020), 20 pages. https://doi.org/10.1145/3427333

Digital Library

[46]

Shumin Zhai, Jing Kong, and Xiangshi Ren. 2004. Speed-accuracy tradeoff in Fitts' law tasks: on the equivalency of actual and nominal pointing precision. International Journal of Human-Computer Studies 61, 6 (2004), 823--856. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijhcs.2004.09.007

Digital Library

Cited By

Yamanaka SUsuba HOba YKinoshita TTomihari RKasahara NMiyashita H(2024)Verifying Finger-Fitts Models for Normalizing Subjective Speed-Accuracy BiasesProceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction10.1145/36765328:MHCI(1-24)Online publication date: 24-Sep-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3676532
Ling KZhao HFan XNiu XYin WLiu YWang CBi X(2024)Model Touch Pointing and Detect Parkinson's Disease via a Mobile GameProceedings of the ACM on Interactive, Mobile, Wearable and Ubiquitous Technologies10.1145/36596278:2(1-24)Online publication date: 15-May-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3659627
Yamanaka SUsuba HSato J(2024)Behavioral Differences between Tap and Swipe: Observations on Time, Error, Touch-point Distribution, and Trajectory for Tap-and-swipe Enabled TargetsProceedings of the 2024 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/3613904.3642272(1-12)Online publication date: 11-May-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3613904.3642272

Index Terms

Computing Touch-Point Ambiguity on Mobile Touchscreens for Modeling Target Selection Times
1. Human-centered computing
  1. Human computer interaction (HCI)
    1. HCI theory, concepts and models
    2. Interaction techniques
      1. Pointing

Recommendations

Investigating the effectiveness of tactile feedback for mobile touchscreens
CHI '08: Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems

This paper presents a study of finger-based text entry for mobile devices with touchscreens. Many devices are now coming to market that have no physical keyboards (the Apple iPhone being a very popular example). Touchscreen keyboards lack any tactile ...
Abracadabra: wireless, high-precision, and unpowered finger input for very small mobile devices
UIST '09: Proceedings of the 22nd annual ACM symposium on User interface software and technology

We present Abracadabra, a magnetically driven input technique that offers users wireless, unpowered, high fidelity finger input for mobile devices with very small screens. By extending the input area to many times the size of the device's screen, our ...
Examining Fitts' and FFitts' Law Models for Children's Pointing Tasks on Touchscreens
AVI '20: Proceedings of the 2020 International Conference on Advanced Visual Interfaces

Fitts' law has accurately modeled both children's and adults' pointing movements, but it is not as precise for modeling movement to small targets. To address this issue, prior work presented FFitts' law, which is more exact than Fitts' law for modeling ...

Comments

Information & Contributors

Information

Published In

cover image Proceedings of the ACM on Interactive, Mobile, Wearable and Ubiquitous Technologies

Proceedings of the ACM on Interactive, Mobile, Wearable and Ubiquitous Technologies Volume 5, Issue 4

Dec 2021

1307 pages

EISSN:2474-9567

DOI:10.1145/3508492

Issue’s Table of Contents

Copyright © 2021 ACM.

Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than the author(s) must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected].

Publisher

Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 30 December 2021

Published in IMWUT Volume 5, Issue 4

Permissions

Request permissions for this article.

Request Permissions

Check for updates

Author Tags

Qualifiers

Research-article
Research
Refereed

Contributors

Other Metrics

View Article Metrics

Bibliometrics & Citations

Bibliometrics

Article Metrics

3
Total Citations
View Citations
132
Total Downloads

Downloads (Last 12 months)23
Downloads (Last 6 weeks)4

Reflects downloads up to 09 Nov 2024

Other Metrics

View Author Metrics

Citations

Cited By

Yamanaka SUsuba HOba YKinoshita TTomihari RKasahara NMiyashita H(2024)Verifying Finger-Fitts Models for Normalizing Subjective Speed-Accuracy BiasesProceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction10.1145/36765328:MHCI(1-24)Online publication date: 24-Sep-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3676532
Ling KZhao HFan XNiu XYin WLiu YWang CBi X(2024)Model Touch Pointing and Detect Parkinson's Disease via a Mobile GameProceedings of the ACM on Interactive, Mobile, Wearable and Ubiquitous Technologies10.1145/36596278:2(1-24)Online publication date: 15-May-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3659627
Yamanaka SUsuba HSato J(2024)Behavioral Differences between Tap and Swipe: Observations on Time, Error, Touch-point Distribution, and Trajectory for Tap-and-swipe Enabled TargetsProceedings of the 2024 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/3613904.3642272(1-12)Online publication date: 11-May-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3613904.3642272

View Options

Get Access

Login options

Check if you have access through your login credentials or your institution to get full access on this article.

Full Access

Get this Article

View options

PDF

View or Download as a PDF file.

eReader

View online with eReader.

Media

Figures

Other

Tables

View Issue’s Table of Contents