Many Fingers Make Light Work: Non-Visual Capacitive Surface Exploration

In this paper we investigate how we can change interactions with mobile devices so we can better support subtle low effort intermittent interaction. In particular we conducted an evaluation with varying interaction techniques which looked at non-visual touch based exploration of information on a capacitive surface. The results of this evaluation indicate that there is very little difference in terms of selection accuracy between the interaction techniques that we implemented and a slight but significant time reduction when using multiple fingers to search, over one finger. Users found locating information and relating information to physical landmarks easier than relating virtual locations to each other. In addition it was found that search strategy and interaction varied between tasks and also at different points in the task.