ForcePicker: Space-Efficient Value Input on Force-Sensitive Mobile Touchscreens

(CHI '18 Honorable Mention Award)

Full paper at ACM CHI 2018 by Christian CorstenSimon VoelkerAndreas LinkJan Borchers.


This project demonstrates the use of force touch to provide an alternative to today's standard "picker" dialogs on smartphones that are used to select values such as dates and times. With trained users, the ForcePicker outperforms the standard picker, at a fraction of the display footprint. 

Abstract

Picking values from long ordered lists, such as when setting a date or time, is a common task on smartphones. However, the system pickers and tables used for this require significant screen space for spinning and dragging, covering other information or pushing it off-screen. The Force Picker reduces this footprint by letting users increase and decrease values over a wide range using force touch for rate-based control. However, changing input direction this way is difficult. We propose three techniques to address this. With our best candidate, Thumb-Roll, the Force Picker lets untrained users achieve similar accuracy as a standard picker, albeit less quickly. Shrinking it to a single table row, 20% of the iOS picker height, slightly affects completion time, but not accuracy. Intriguingly, after 70 minutes of training, users were significantly faster with this minimized Thumb-Roll Picker compared to the standard picker, at the same accuracy and only 6% of the gesture footprint. We close with application examples.


Contact: Christian Corsten

Publications


    2018

  • Christian Corsten, Simon Voelker, Andreas Link and Jan Borchers. Use the Force Picker, Luke: Space-Efficient Value Input on Force-Sensitive Mobile Touchscreens.  In Proceedings of the 2018 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, CHI '18, pages 661:1–661:12, ACM, New York, NY, USA, April 2018.
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