A comparison of human-computer user interface methods: The effectiveness of touch interface compared to mouse

This dissertation examines the effectiveness of a touch user interface when compared with that of a traditional mouse. The effectiveness of a second hand, used to hold a touch interface is also considered. Following an investigation into existing research in the domain of touch based user interfaces, an experiment was designed to evaluate the effectiveness of selection, dragging and gesture based input tasks undertaken with both a mouse and using a touch interface. Additionally operation of the touch interface when the device was held in the hand was compared to operation when the touch interface was situated horizontally on a desk, to determine the impact of bimanual operation. The findings suggest that there is little variation in usability between a touch device held in the hand and situated on a desk, but that the touch interface provides an improved experience for an end user over that of a mouse based interface not only for selection as previous researches had indicated, but also for dragging and gesture interaction based input