To touch or not to touch : A comparison between traditional and touchscreen interface within personal computers

Abstract: Touchscreen technology is gradually becoming more popular and massive in our present society to the point where it is hard to find a person that has never used this interface system. Handheld devices such as mobile phones and tablets are predominantly based on touchscreens as the main way to interact with them. Nevertheless, that is not the case when it comes to personal computers either desktop machines or laptops which are still chiefly based on traditional keyboard and mouse as their main input system. In this study we explore the potential that touchscreen based interface can offer for personal computers carrying through an observational experiment with six participants that were asked to perform a list of tasks using both traditional keyboard-mouse interface and touchscreen interface. The measurements during the observation concerned time and error rate for every task. Each participant was interviewed right after the completion of the observational phase in order to get a qualitative insight on their views and perceptions regarding both interfaces. The data collected was analyzed based on some existing models within touchscreen interface and human-computer interaction that have been elaborated in previews research. The final results led to the conclusion, that touchscreen-based interface proved to be slower and have higher error rate than traditional interface in a big number of the tasks performed by the participants. Similarly, the general perception of the people towards having touchscreen on a personal computer still seems a bit doubtful, although they do see some concrete positive aspects about this interface. Nevertheless, touchscreen outperformed traditional interface in some particular tasks. This implies that touchscreen interface has a clear potential for personal computers that would let users utilize these machines in a much broader and more interactive way than people do it today with the traditional keyboard-mouse interface.