Touch Drag: A Technique for Placing a Cursor on Small Touch Screens

摘要

As mobile devices with touch screens are developed, more people perform text-editing tasks on their mobile devices. This increases the importance of developing a new cursor-pointing technique that will enable users to control the cursor with ease. The current cursor-pointing techniques have several drawbacks. First, they have occlusion problems and low target accessibility at the boundary of the screen. Moreover, a continuous stream of touch is needed. This study proposes a Touch & Drag technique that will remedy these drawbacks. The usability of Touch & Drag is compared experimentally to those of other methods such as Land-on, Shift, and Modified takeoff. Two objective measures of performance (task completion time and number of errors) were obtained and two subjective measures (ease of use and preference) were collected in an experiment. The results showed that Touch & Drag had fewer errors than Land-on and Modified take-off. It was also more efficient than Land-on and was the most preferred technique by users.