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

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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