Exploring finger specific touch screen interaction for mobile phone user interfaces

Today, mobile phones with touch screens are widespread but as de facto, the interaction space is limited to single finger taps or multitouch gestures. In this paper, we present an investigation of a novel interaction concept for mobile phone touch screen input by distinguishing between different fingers. To explore the concept, we organized three user studies (number of participants 37, 13 and 25), where we charted the finger specific input performance, and evaluated the concept with both a Wizard-of-Oz prototype and a functional implementation. The salient results show, e.g. statistical differences in comfort and perceived speed for interacting with different fingers, and that users see value in finger specific functionality, especially in providing fast shortcuts to different functions and as a means to personalize the interaction with the device.

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