Is it possible to interact with a handheld device while holding it in both hands
Tayfur Coskun, Eva Artinger, Simon Nestler, Amal Benzina, Gudrun Johanna Klinker · 2012
Intuitiveness, attractiveness and efficiency are in general important charac- teristics of high quality User Interfaces (UI). In the case of a Mass Casualty Incident (MCI) and other life threatening situations good user interfaces are essential as every second counts in these time-critical situations. Finding the best way to interact with the system is a challenge with many open issues. Therefore, it is essential to test different UI alternatives to determine important usability issues as those mentioned before. This paper focuses on the research question how patients can be selected on a map applica- tion which runs on a rugged tablet PC. A rugged tablet PC is in general heavy because of its robustness, which introduces a new special requirement in addition to the exist- ing UI requirements. Consequently, since the users are forced to hold the tablet PC with two hands because of its heaviness, they have to perform all UI interaction with the thumbs. This implies that the users are not able to reach every item on the screen of the tablet PC. Therefore all UI elements have to be either on the left or on the right hand-side of the screen. The implementation and the evaluation of the UI alternatives presented in this paper were performed within the scope of the SpeedUp project 1 .