Touch Screens for the Older User

Abstract

It has been 20 years since Ben Schneiderman predicted that there would be an increase in the use of touch screen applications yet it has been only in recent years that this prediction has come to pass. The concept of a touch screen computer was first introduced in 1965 by E.A. Johnson who described the possibilities of touch screen technology to support air traffic controllers. In this article Johnson describes how “the touch display coupled to a computer can be considered as a keyboard”, a novel approach at the time. Touch screens were brought into the public domain in 1971 by Elographics, Inc. which instigated the development of public touch screen technology such as automated teller machines (ATMs) and information kiosks (Brown et al., 2011). Another milestone in the history of touch technology was the introduction of the personal touch screen computer, HP-150, developed by Hewlett-Packard in 1983 (Sukumar, 1984). The purpose of this early design was to offer individuals an intuitive technology option. Although touch screen systems have maintained this intuitiveness and ease of use over the years, problems that existed with early systems still provide challenges for designers and developers to this day.