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How fast is fast enough?: a study of the effects of latency in direct-touch pointing tasks

Published: 27 April 2013 Publication History

Abstract

Although advances in touchscreen technology have provided us with more precise devices, touchscreens are still laden with latency issues. Common commercial devices present with latency up to 125ms. Although these levels have been shown to impact users' perception of the responsiveness of the system [16], relatively little is known about the impact of latency on the performance of tasks common to direct-touch interfaces, such as direct physical manipulation.
In this paper, we study the effect of latency of a direct-touch pointing device on dragging tasks. Our tests show that user performance decreases as latency increases. We also find that user performance is more severely affected by latency when targets are smaller or farther away. We present a detailed analysis of users' coping mechanisms for latency, and present the results of a follow-up study demonstrating user perception of latency in the land-on phase of the dragging task.

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    cover image ACM Conferences
    CHI '13: Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
    April 2013
    3550 pages
    ISBN:9781450318990
    DOI:10.1145/2470654
    Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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    Published: 27 April 2013

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    Author Tags

    1. direct input
    2. direct manipulations
    3. latency
    4. touch input

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