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100,000,000 taps: analysis and improvement of touch performance in the large

Published: 30 August 2011 Publication History

Abstract

Touchscreens became the dominant input device for smartphones. Users' touch behaviour has been widely studied in lab studies with a relative low number of participants. In contrast, we published a game in the Android Market that records the touch behaviour when executing a controlled task to collect large amounts of touch events. Players' task is to simply touch circles appearing on the screen. Data from 91,731 installations has been collected and players produced 120,626,225 touch events. We determined the error rates for different target sizes and screen locations. The amount of data enabled us to show that touch positions are systematically skewed. A compensation function that shifts the users' touches to reduce the amount of errors is derived from the data and evaluated by publishing an update of the game. The independent-measures experiment with data from 12,201 installations and 15,326,444 touch events shows that the function reduces the error rate by 7.79%. We argue that such a compensation function could improve the touch performance of virtually every smartphone user.

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cover image ACM Other conferences
MobileHCI '11: Proceedings of the 13th International Conference on Human Computer Interaction with Mobile Devices and Services
August 2011
781 pages
ISBN:9781450305419
DOI:10.1145/2037373
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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  • Nokia
  • Swedish Institute of Computer Science: Swedish Institute of Computer Science
  • ERICSSON

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Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 30 August 2011

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Author Tags

  1. Android Market
  2. app store
  3. large-scale
  4. mobile phone
  5. public study
  6. touch screen
  7. user study

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MobileHCI '11
Sponsor:
  • Swedish Institute of Computer Science

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