Design considerations for touch screens – Part2

Pros and Cons of Touchscreens
The following overview lists advantages and disadvantages of touchscreens and summarizes their characteristics.

Touchscreen Pros
Direct: Direct pointing to objects, direct relationship between hand and cursor movement (distance, speed and direction), because the hand is moving on the same surface that the cursor is moving, manipulating objects on the screen is similar to manipulating them in the manual world

Fast (but less precise without pen)

Finger is usable, any pen is usable (usually no cable needed

No keyboard necessary for applications that need menu selections only -> saves desk space

Suited to: novices, applications for information retrieval, high-use environments

Touchscreen Cons
Low precision (finger): Imprecise positioning, possible problems with eye parallaxis (with pen, too),
the finger may be too large for accurate pointing with small objects -> a pen is more accurate.

Hand movements (if used with keyboard): Requires that users move the hand away from the keyboard; a stylus requires also hand movements to take up the pen.

Fatigue: Straining the arm muscles under heavy use (especially if the screen is placed vertically).

Sitting/Standing position: The user has to sit/stand close to the screen.

Dirt: The screen gets dirty from finger prints.

Screen coverage: The user's hand, the finger or the pen may obscure parts of the screen.

Activation: Usually direct activation of the selected function, when the screen is touched; there is no special "activation" button as with a light pen or a mouse.

This post is contributed by Mallikarjun