The relationship between touchscreen sizes of smartphones and hand dimensions

Abstract

With the development of communication technology, mobile phone seems to become 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. A smartphone is a mobile phone built on a mobile operating system with advanced computing capability. Many functionality and application like digital cameras, GPS and web-browser, were combined on the smartphone to form a multi-use device. Most of modern smartphones include high-resolution touchscreens for display and control. As the development of smartphone, 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. Sixty subjects, including 30 males and 30 females were invited to attend the experiment. The experiment design includes 3 touchscreen sizes. The hand length and palm width were both divided into three categories respectively. The analyzed results indicates that the relationships between touchscreen size and category of hand length and between touchscreen size and category of palm width are both positive from the views of error rate and the subjective fatigue. Therefore, larger touchscreen size is more appropriate to larger hand and palm. Furthermore, longer operation time is needed for people who have small hand and palm because they spend more time to move their thumb and handle the smartphone stably. © 2013 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.