Understanding Affordance, System State, and Feedback in Shape-Changing Buttons

Research on shape-changing interfaces has explored various technologies, parameters for shape changes, and transformations between shapes. While much is known about how to implement these variations, it is unclear what affordance they provide, how users understand their relation to the underlying system state, and how feedback via shape change is perceived. We investigated this by studying how 15 participants perceived and used 13 shape-changing buttons. The buttons covered several aspects of affordance, system state, and feedback, including invite-to-touch movements, two styles of transition animation, and two actuation technologies. Participants explored and interacted with the buttons while thinking aloud. The results show that affordances are hard to communicate clearly with shape change; while some movements invited actions, others were seen as a malfunction. The best clue as to button state was provided by the position of the button in combination with vibration. Linear transition animation for changes in button state was the best received form of shape-change feedback. We discuss also how these findings can inform the design of shape-changing interfaces more generally.

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