Investigating Eyes-Free Recognition and Distinguishability of Textile Icons in Pairs

Paper at ACM TEI '25
by Oliver Nowak, René Schäfer, Elisabeth Jane Buttkus, Lea Schirp, Heiko Müller, and Jan Borchers

Abstract

Textile interfaces enable silent and discreet input on clothing, accessories, and smart home furniture. While researchers already presented approaches to make them technologically feasible, it is not fully clear how users experience textile interfaces and how well users perform when vision-free usage is encouraged. Recently, designs of single textile icons, i.e., symbols used as textile buttons or labels, were investigated. Practical user interfaces, however, typically consist of entire groups of nearby icons. Their haptic distinguishability is key for seamless operation. Furthermore, it is unclear whether icon recognition benefits or suffers when comparing neighboring icons is possible. We conducted a study where users blindly palpated icon pairs, tried to recognize the individual shapes and rated how easy they were to tell apart. We present our observations on haptic distinguishability, which, inter alia, show that more haptic cues via neighboring icons do not impact shape recognition.

Authors

Oliver
Nowak

René
Schäfer

Elisebeth Jane
Buttkus

Lea
Schirp

Heiko
Müller

Jan
Borchers

Publications

    2023

  • René Schäfer, Oliver Nowak, Lovis Bero Suchmann, Sören Schröder and Jan Borchers. What’s That Shape? Investigating Eyes-Free Recognition of Textile Icons.  In Proceedings of the 2023 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, CHI '23, pages 12, Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, April 2023.
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