Paper Reading #11 - Contact Area Interaction with Sliding Widgets

Comments
Stephen Morrow
Miguel Cardenas
Reference
Contact Area Interaction with Sliding Widgets
Tomer Moscovich
UIST October 4-7,2009 Victoria, British Columbia, Canada

Summary

At this point, it is eminent that touchscreen systems have started replacing the classic cursor based systems. A concrete example is the design of cell phones or now called smart phones. This paper talks about a proposed touchscreen widgets design that aims at solving some of the problems that users encounter with this shift to the touchscreen era. The current touchscreen widgets were developed for mouse or cursor based systems, and therefore users have encountered multiple problems with their input interactions. One of the main issues with touchscreen systems is the problem known as the fat finger problem, as well as the selection of multiple objects with a single touch. Moscovich presents an innovative idea to solve these problems. He claims the main problem is that current systems are designed to interact to the one-pixel selection point model. The proposed solution is to used an interaction based on area selection and sliding. This can resolve the ambiguity of which target the user wants to select. There is no need for hardware update to change this interaction. According to Moscovich, approximating the area selection with a circle instead of the one-pixel selection point works much better.
Discussion
This paper was very interesting to me because the last paper reading dealt with a similar issue, which is the fat finger problem. Although in this paper, the idea for fixing that problem is much more concise. I have a Samsung Fascinate smart phone that has an Android operating system, and it is interesting to see that some of the solutions proposed in this paper are actually present in my phone. The sliding mechanism is used in my phone for incoming calls, and when I want to unlock my screen. Pictures are shown to the right to depict this.