This study of hand anthropometry and touchscreen size of smartphones

Abstract

With the development of communication technology, smartphone becomes an important personnel device that everyone must have. As the introduction of 3rd Generation mobile telecommunication, the technology of touch screen was started to be applied on the mobile phones and an indispensable component on a 3G smartphone that is built in advanced computing capability like digital cameras, GPS and web-browser. Most of modern smartphones include high-resolution touchscreens for display and control and the size of touchscreen becomes larger and larger. However, the question is that a larger screen is convenient to every user? The aim of this study is to realize the relationship between touchscreen sizes of smartphones and user’s relative hand dimensions based on the operation time, operation error rate and subjective thumb fatigue. One hundred subjects, including 50 males and 50 females were invited to attend the experiment. The experiment design includes 4 touchscreen sizes. The hand length and hand width were both divided into 4 categories respectively. The results indicated there is a rapid increasing trend from 3.5 in. screen to 5.7 in. screen for smaller hand length/width and the trend decreases firstly slight and then increases for large hand length/width. Touchscreen size from 4.6 in. to 5.0 in. is suggested for most people because this interval of screen size is relatively suitable based on the analysis of hand dimensions and 3 performance evaluation indices. Too large touchscreen (5.7 in.) is hard to use for any hand length or width.