Shaping Textile Sliders:
An Evaluation of
Form Factors and Tick Marks for Textile Sliders
Paper at ACM CHI '22
by Oliver Nowak, René Schäfer, Anke Brocker, Philipp Wacker, and Jan Borchers
Abstract
Textile interfaces enable designers to integrate unobtrusive media and smart home controls into furniture such as sofas. While the technical aspects of such controllers have been subject of numerous research projects, the physical form factor of these controls has received little attention so far. This work investigates how general design properties, such as overall slider shape, raised vs. recessed stitches, and number and layout of tick marks, affect users' preferences and performance.
Our first user study identified a preference for certain design combinations, such as recessed, closed-shaped sliders. Our second user study included performance measurements on variations of the preferred designs from study 1, and took a closer look at tick marks. Tick marks supported orientation better than slider shape, sliders with at least 3 tick marks were preferred and performed well. Non-uniform, equally distributed tick marks reduced the movements users needed to orient themselves on the slider.
Video
Publications
- Oliver Nowak, René Schäfer, Anke Brocker, Philipp Wacker and Jan Borchers. Shaping Textile Sliders: An Evaluation of Form Factors and Tick Marks for Textile Sliders. In CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, CHI '22, Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, April 2022.