Publications

CONFERENCE (INTERNATIONAL) Towards More Practical Spacing for Smartphone Touch GUI Objects Accompanied by Distractors

Shota Yamanaka, Hiroaki Shimono (Meiji University), and Homei Miyashita (Meiji University)

The 2019 ACM International Conference on Interactive Surfaces and Spaces (ACM ISS 2019)

November 10, 2019

To achieve better touch GUI designs, researchers have studied optimal target margins, but state-of-the-art results on this topic have been observed for only middle-size touchscreens. In this study, to better determine more practical target arrangements for smartphone GUIs, we conducted four experiments to test the effects of gaps among targets on touch pointing performance. Two lab-based and two crowd-based experiments showed that wider gaps tend to help users reduce the task completion time and the rate of accidental taps on unintended items. For 1D and 2D tasks, the results of the lab-based study with a one-handed thumb operation style showed that 4-mm gaps were the smallest sizes to remove negative effects of surrounding items. The results of the crowd-based study, however, indicated no specific gaps to completely remove the negative effects.

Paper : Towards More Practical Spacing for Smartphone Touch GUI Objects Accompanied by Distractors (external link)