A Comparative Study of Map Exploration Interfaces for Multi-Touch Tabletops

ABSTRACT

With the advent of multi-touch tabletops, software developers are creating innovative interfaces for applications such as interactive map systems. In this article, we summarized three representative interfaces from prevalent electronic map applications and literatures—gesture based, widget based, and hybrid, which supported both gestures and widgets—and then compared the effectiveness and the efficiency of these three interfaces by experiments. The results show that the hybrid interface had a better performance, requiring less task-completion time and operations, and causing less arm fatigue. The widget-based interface had the least distance traversed by fingers, but it required many tapping operations. The gesture-based interface was easier to learn compared to the widget-based interface, but the distance traversed during finger movements was the longest. Based on the findings from our experiments, we discuss the implications for the design of map exploration interfaces on multi-touch tabletops.

Acknowledgments

This work was funded by the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology of China (No. 2010ZX01042-002-003-001), China Knowledge Centre for Engineering Sciences and Technology (No. CKCEST-2014-1-5), the Natural Science Foundation of China (Nos. 60703040 and 61332017), the Science and Technology Department of Zhejiang Province (Nos. 2011C13042 and 2015C33002). We would like to thank all the participants for all the time and energy they have contributed to this research.

Notes

¹ in our implementation, 1 pixel = 0.95 mm

² http://www.hci.cn

³ http://ccv.nuigroup.com/

⁴ http://nuigroup.com/touchlib/

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Ling Chen

Liwen Wang is a Ph.D. student in the College of Computer Science and Technology, Zhejiang University, China. Her research interests include human–computer interaction, ubiquitous computing, and location-based services.

Liwen Wang

Liwen Wang is a Ph.D. student in the College of Computer Science and Technology, Zhejiang University, China. Her research interests include human–computer interaction, ubiquitous computing, and location-based services.

Weikai Huang

Weikai Huang was a master student in the College of Computer Science and Technology, Zhejiang University, China when this research was performed. His research interests include ubiquitous computing, multi-touch, and HCI. He currently holds a position in Shanghai Electro-Mechanical Engineering Institute.

Gencai Chen

Ling Chen is an Associate Professor in the College of Computer Science and Technology, Zhejiang University, China, where he received his Ph.D. in computer science in 2004. His research interests include ubiquitous computing, location-aware computing, human–computer interaction, and data mining.

Gencai Chen is a professor in the College of Computer Science and Technology, Zhejiang University, China. His research interests include location-aware computing, HCI, database management systems, and data mining.