VibeTonz Studio and Designing Haptic Effects for Touchscreens

VibeTonz® Studio, a Windows-based developer tool with intuitive graphical user interface, makes designing haptic effects for touchscreen presses easy. Still, you’ll want to follow these tried and true guidelines to achieve a quality feel for touchscreen interactions.

When designing haptic effects for touchscreens, your primary goal is to simulate the response of a real mechanical button. Think about all the real buttons you’ve pressed. What separates a feeling of quality from one that’s unsatisfying or cheap-feeling? These tips may help you achieve the best user experience for touchscreen button presses:

• Keep haptic effects for virtual buttons short and simple. Effects longer than 100 ms in duration generally seem too “buzzy” (vibrational) for most users. Instead, keep effect durations in the 30–90 ms range.
  
  
• Do not limit use of haptics to the press action only. Consider button release effects, as well. After all, mechanical buttons provide both types of response.
  
  
• Personalization of haptic touch effects is a feature valued by many users. Try not to limit the user to default effects within your application. Creating an options menu that allows users to vary the touch effect strength globally in the same way they can adjust sound volume offers the best user experience. You might also consider supplying a choice of different touch effects so users can further personalize their phone.
  
  
• Consider haptic effects for additional user interface actions. A short haptic effect for every contact when scrolling through a rate-controlled list of contacts would give the user a more mechanical sense of the action. Or, tactile cues to match menu animations, like expanding, collapsing, or item selection, would help to confirm for the user that they’ve done what they intended to do. A short bounce or bump-like effect when the end of a list has been reached is another way the phone can communicate and aid understanding.