Investigating the effectiveness of tactile feedback for mobile touchscreens

TLDR

Many mobile devices now lack physical keyboards, and touchscreen keyboards without tactile feedback can hinder accurate text entry. This paper investigates finger‑based text entry on mobile touchscreens. The authors conducted experiments comparing a physical keyboard, a standard touchscreen, and a touchscreen with added tactile feedback in both static and mobile settings. Adding tactile feedback to touchscreens markedly improves finger‑based text entry, nearly matching physical keyboard performance, and higher‑spec actuators enhance it further, indicating manufacturers should adopt tactile feedback.

Abstract

This paper presents a study of finger-based text entry for mobile devices with touchscreens. Many devices are now coming to market that have no physical keyboards (the Apple iPhone being a very popular example). Touchscreen keyboards lack any tactile feedback and this may cause problems for entering text and phone numbers. We ran an experiment to compare devices with a physical keyboard, a standard touchscreen and a touchscreen with tactile feedback added. We tested this in both static and mobile environments. The results showed that the addition of tactile feedback to the touchscreen significantly improved finger-based text entry, bringing it close to the performance of a real physical keyboard. A second experiment showed that higher specification tactile actuators could improve performance even further. The results suggest that manufacturers should use tactile feedback in their touchscreen devices to regain some of the feeling lost when interacting on a touchscreen with a finger.