PreciseTouch : a multi-finger technique for targeting small items on touchscreens

Abstract

Touchscreen technology has transformed user interactions, making them more intuitive and accessible. However, targeting small items on the touchscreen is still challenging, and the performance of direct touches on the item can lead to inaccurate touch inputs, particularly on a cluster of closely spaced targets. This issue can hinder user experience and create challenges in precision-sensitive situations, such as editing at pixel levels and pointing to mini-size items on UIs. Therefore, we introduce PreciseTouch, a two-step interaction technique that employs multi-finger coordination for pixel-level accuracy on touchscreen interfaces. We conducted two user studies to evaluate PreciseTouch with the traditional direct touch methods across various conditions, primarily measuring user accuracy and time. Our first study with a Whack-A-Mole task compares Direct Touch and PreciseTouch tasks at three distances and five target sizes. The second study introduces a penalty scheme, highlighting the user performance of PreciseTouch with a photo editing task.