Graeme Zinck
University of Waterloo, Waterloo, Ontario, Canada
Foldable touch screens are increasingly popular, but little research has explored how the hinge impacts usability and performance. We evaluate across- and along-hinge drag gestures on a series of prototypes emulating foldable all-screen laptops with a curved hinge radius ranging from 1mm to 24mm. Results show that using a large 24mm hinge radius instead of a small 1mm hinge radius can decrease drag time by 13% and movement variability by 7% for touch input. However, hinge radius had no effect on performance for pen input. Further, we found that dragging along the hinge was up to 30% faster than dragging across the hinge, especially when dragging across at an acute angle to the hinge. Using these results, we demonstrate use cases for across- and along-hinge gestures. Our findings provide guidance for hardware and interaction designers seeking to create foldable touchscreen devices and their accompanying software.
https://doi.org/10.1145/3544548.3580825
The ACM CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (https://chi2023.acm.org/)