A study on usability of finger's moving direction in direct touch environment

Abstract

Moving user's finger in a certain direction is a fundamental action when interacting with a touch screen. Previous literatures have discussed the techniques on how to exploit finger's directional movement in the design of user interface widgets. However, few studies have investigated the usability issues of finger's directional movement. In this paper, we investigate the performance of two algorithms to determine the slant angle of finger's moving direction. The experimental results prove that both algorithms can determine moving direction accurately. And the approximating the direction of finger movement using all samples from a trajectory generates better results than using only 2 samples. © 2012 Springer-Verlag GmbH Berlin Heidelberg.