Handling ambiguous user input on touchscreen kiosks

Touchscreen kiosks are becoming an increasingly popular means of providing a wide arrange of services to the public. However, the principal drawback of these types of systems lies within the elevated error rates due to finger imprecision and screen miscalibration. These issues become worrisome, considering the greater responsibilities and reliance placed upon touchscreens. This thesis investigates two novel techniques that attempt to alleviate these interaction problems. The first technique, predictive pointing, incorporates information regarding past interactions and an area cursor (which maps the user's touch to a circular area rather than a single point) to provide a better estimate of the intended selection. The second technique, gestural drawing, allows users to draw particular shapes onscreen to execute actions as an alternative means of input that is largely unaffected by issues of miscalibration. Results from a user study indicated that both techniques provided significant advantages in not only lowering error rates, but also improving task completion times over traditional tasks of target selection.

Department dc:contributor.department

Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Dept. of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science.

Grantor dc:publisher

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Year dc:date.issued

2005

Author dc:creator

• Leung, Christopher K

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Larry Rudolph.

• Electrical Engineering and Computer Science.

Statement dc:rights

• M.I.T. theses are protected by copyright. They may be viewed from this source for any purpose, but reproduction or distribution in any format is prohibited without written permission. See provided URL for inquiries about permission.

Licence dc:rights.uri

• http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/7582

Language dc:language.iso

eng

Handle dc:identifier.uri

http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/34461

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:dspace.mit.edu:1721.1/34461