We present a study that quantifies the effect of cold temperature on smartphone input performance, particularly on tapping tasks. Our results show that smartphone input performance decreases when completing tapping tasks in cold temperatures. We show that colder temperature is associated with lower throughput and less accurate performance when using the phone in both one-handed and two-handed operations. We also demonstrate that colder temperature is related to higher error rate when using the phone in one-handed operation only, but not two-handed. Finally, we identify a number of design recommendations from the literature that can be considered as a countermeasure to poorer smartphone input performance in completing tapping tasks in cold temperature.

We evaluate the situational impairments caused by cold ambient temperature on fine-motor movement and vigilance during mobile interaction. For this purpose, we tested two mobile phone applications that measure fine motor skills and vigilance in controlled temperature settings. Our results show that cold adversely affected participants' fine-motor skills performance, but not vigilance. Based on our results we highlight the importance of correcting measurements when investigating performance of cognitive tasks to take into account the physical element of the tasks. Finally, we identify a number of design recommendations from literature that can mitigate the adverse effect of cold ambiance on interaction with mobile devices.