Feel-good touch

Abstract

Earlier research has shown the benefits of tactile feedback for touch screen widgets in all metrics: performance, usability and user experience. In our current research the goal was to go deeper in understanding the characteristics of a tactile click for virtual buttons. More specifically we wanted to find a tactile click which is the most pleasant to use with a finger. We used two actuator solutions in a small mobile touch screen: piezo actuators or a standard vibration motor. We conducted three experiments: The first and second experiments aimed to find the most pleasant tactile feedback done with the piezo actuators or a vibration motor, respectively, and the third one combined and compared the results from the first two experiments. The results from the first two experiments showed significant differences for the perceived pleasantness of the tactile clicks, and we used these most pleasant clicks in the comparison experiment in addition to the condition with no tactile feedback. Our findings confirmed results from earlier studies showing that tactile feedback is superior to a nontactile condition when virtual buttons are used with the finger regardless of the technology behind the tactile feedback. Another finding suggests that the users perceived the feedback done with piezo actuators slightly more pleasant than the vibration motor based feedback, although not statistically significantly. These results indicate that it is possible to modify the characteristics of the virtual button tactile clicks towards the most pleasant ones, and on the other hand this knowledge can help designers to create better touch screen virtual buttons and keyboards.