CircularSelection
Katrin Plaumann, Michael Müller, Enrico Rukzio · 2016
As the availability of smartwatches advances, small round touch-screens are increasingly used. Until recently, round touchscreens were rather uncommon, and so most current user interfaces for small round touchscreens are still based on rectangular interface designs. Adjusting these standard rectangular interfaces to round touchscreens without loosing content comes with loss of precious display space. To overcome this issue for list interfaces, we introduce CircularSelection. CircularSelection is a list selection interface especially designed for small round touchscreens. CircularSelection consists of a ring aligned to the edge of the touchscreen. On that ring, categories of list entries can be preselected. The selected categorie's entries are displayed in the middle of said ring, and can be selected with a tab. In this paper, we explore the design space of CircularSelection by conducting a user study (n = 24) examining its dimensions. We further compare CircularSelection to a traditional smartwatch list selection interface in a second user study (n = 15). Our results clearly show that CircularSelection outperforms traditional smartwatch list interfaces in terms of user preference as well as task completion time (up to 66% faster for large lists and 45% for small lists).