Adaptive Control-Display Ratios for Smartphones
Sean T. Hayes, Julie A. Adams · Proceedings of the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society Annual Meeting · 2016
Smartphones pose new design challenges for precise interactions, prompting the development of indirect interaction techniques that improve performance by reducing the occlusion caused by touch input. Direct touch interaction (e.g., tap to select) is imprecise, due to occlusion and the finger’s surface area. Many cursor-based interaction techniques address this issue; however, these techniques do not dynamically adjust the control-to-display movement ratio ( CD ratio ) to improve accuracy and interaction times. This paper analyzes the performance benefits of applying adaptive CD ratio enhancements to smartphone interaction for target-selection tasks. Existing desktop computer enhancements and a new enhancement method, Magnetic Targets, are compared. Magnetic Targets resulted in significantly shorter target selection times compared to the existing enhancements. Further, a simple method that combined enhancements to provide a CD ratio based on a greater context of the interactions demonstrated performance improvements.