Side Pressure for Bidirectional Navigation on Small Devices

Daniel Spelmezan (1, 2) , Caroline Appert (1, 2) , Olivier Chapuis (1, 2) , Emmanuel Pietriga (1, 3)

1 IN-SITU - Situated interaction
2 LRI - Laboratoire de Recherche en Informatique
3 Inria Chile

Virtual navigation on a mobile touchscreen is usually performed using finger gestures: drag and flick to scroll or pan, pinch to zoom. While easy to learn and perform, these gestures cause significant occlusion of the display. They also require users to explicitly switch between navigation mode and edit mode to either change the viewport's position in the document, or manipulate the actual content displayed in that viewport, respectively. SidePress augments mobile devices with two continuous pressure sensors co-located on one of their sides. It provides users with generic bidirectional navigation capabilities at different levels of granularity, all seamlessly integrated to act as an alternative to traditional navigation techniques, including scrollbars, drag-and-flick, or pinch-to-zoom. We describe the hardware prototype, detail the associated interaction vocabulary for different applications, and report on two laboratory studies. The first shows that users can precisely and efficiently control SidePress; the second, that SidePress can be more efficient than drag-and-flick touch gestures when scrolling large documents.

Keywords: Mobile device; Side pressure; Pressure input; Pressure-based interaction; Single-handed interaction; Scrolling task

Domains: Human-Computer Interaction [cs.HC]

Daniel Spelmezan, Caroline Appert, Olivier Chapuis, Emmanuel Pietriga. Side Pressure for Bidirectional Navigation on Small Devices. Proceedings of the 15th International Conference on Human-Computer Interaction with Mobile Devices and Services, Aug 2013, Munich, Germany. pp.11--20, ⟨10.1145/2493190.2493199⟩. ⟨hal-00850974v2⟩