Identifying unintentional touches on handheld touch screen devices

Accidental triggering of unwanted interaction when using a handheld touch screen device is a problem for many users. Accidental touches on capacitive touch screen based mobile telephones were analyzed in a user test. Patterns that are characteristic of unintentional touches were identified. Layout guidelines to reduce the amount of unintentional touches are presented. Additionally, filtering criteria is defined that rejected 79.6% of unintentional touches whilst rejecting only 0.8% of intentional touches.