Fingerskate: Relaxing the Physical Constraint of Two-Finger Touchscreen Operations

Two-finger operations, such as rotation operations and zoom operations, are now standard touchscreen operations. However, these two-finger operations may pose an ergonomic problem when they are performed with one hand. FingerSkate is an interaction technique to mitigate the ergonomic problem of two-finger operations adopting the concept of gesture relaxation. A preliminary study showed that the FingerSkate technique was accepted well by the participants. In particular, a micro-analysis of finger movements during the study showed that FingerSkate was utilized well for large rotations. In a subsequent user study, the effects of two FingerSkate design options, Concurrency and Pivot, were examined. The Concurrency option had a statistically significant effect on performance and task workload for a docking task. The Pivot option had a statistically significant effect on task workload for a puzzle task. More participants preferred the sequential Concurrency option, and most participants preferred the center-of-object Pivot option.