Using a touchscreen for simple tasks

This work was done in the context of an interdisciplinary project (called ITS) aimed at producing new tools for computer application development. One motivation is to provide designers with a computer-based toolkit from which they can select human-computer interaction techniques appropriate to various contexts and conditions. These experiments extend our work to touchscreens, and provide a basis of comparison with keyboards and arrow keys. Three human-computer interaction methods, including basic entry and autocompletion, were studied in two simple laboratory scenarios: participants specified dates and airlines reservations. Autocompletion was preferred over, and was faster than, basic entry. The a priori countable, minimum number of touches required to use a particular interaction method is a good predictor of how much time people will need to use that interaction method on a particular task. Similar results were found previously with keyboards and arrow keys.