This paper presents a study of finger-based text entry for mobile devices with touchscreens. Many devices are now coming to market that have no physical keyboards (the Apple iPhone being a very popular example). Touchscreen keyboards lack any tactile feedback and this may cause problems for entering text and phone numbers. We ran an experiment to compare devices with a physical keyboard, a standard touchscreen and a touchscreen with tactile feedback added. We tested this in both static and mobile environments. The results showed that the addition of tactile feedback to the touchscreen significantly improved finger-based text entry, bringing it close to the performance of a real physical keyboard. A second experiment showed that higher specification tactile actuators could improve performance even further. The results suggest that manufacturers should use tactile feedback in their touchscreen devices to regain some of the feeling lost when interacting on a touchscreen with a finger.

Camera phones are now very common but there are some issues that affect their usability. These can occur because users look through the LCD to frame the image and can often miss the icons displayed around the edge that present important information about exposure, battery life, number of shots remaining, etc. This may lead to shots being missed or poorly exposed. We created a sonified luminance histogram to present exposure information, a sound cue to indicate memory card space remaining and a tactile cue for battery charge status. A user study showed that participants were able to use the sonified histogram to identify exposure successfully and could recognise the status of the battery and memory card well, suggesting that alternative forms of output could free-up the screen for framing the image.