A Comparison of Touch and Mouse Interaction Techniques for a Graphical Windowing Software Environment

Abstract

This paper reports a behavioral evaluation of touch interface techniques intended to be used with highly interactive, graphical, windowing software environments. Previous research (Mack and Lang, 1989) indicated that touch interface techniques can produce levels of task performance in such environments comparable to that obtained using conventional mouse pointing devices. The touch technology in that study enabled users to emulate the basic interactions associated with using a mouse: that is, to emulate click, double click and dragging techniques using taps, double taps and tap, hold and drag. While encouraging, problems remained, especially when the finger was used as the input device. The purpose of this study was to compare mouse and touch techniques using an alternative to mouse emulation for controlling touch interactions. Instead, users selected one of three possible touch “modes”. In each mode, a simple tap (contact and lift-off) was interpreted by the software in ways corresponding to the three basic mouse interaction techniques. Performance on realistic office task scenarios using a finger and stylus touch techniques and the new touch control method, resulted in comparable performance between mouse and touch stylus when the stylus (but not mouse) was used with a tilted display. Experience with mouse pointing devices, or graphical interfaces enabling direct manipulation, did not affect performance.