User Interface Interactions: Touch Feedback

Digital Controls Reign, But at a Loss

Nowadays, with the need to support an explosion of mobile data, productivity, and multimedia capabilities, phone designers are embracing more flexible control paradigms realized through touchscreens, clickwheels, trackballs, accelerometers, and the like. While such controls provide tremendous adaptability and sleek industrial designs, their use often entails a loss of the tactile feedback loop that helps us, for example, quickly and accurately enter text on a traditional qwerty keyboard.

Haptics Restores Unmistakable Confirmation

The TouchSense® System lets UI designers provide precise haptic effects to give virtual controls confirming response. Haptics dramatically improves task efficiency and overall user satisfaction. The low latency and high resolution supported by a TouchSense solution makes it possible to deliver force profiles that are perceptually similar to familiar mechanical controls like membrane switches and scrollwheels.

One Example

LG Electronics used the TouchSense System to add touch feedback to virtual keypresses on its bestselling Viewty touchscreen handset. Among other features, haptics let the designers present either a portrait-mode 12-digit keypad or a landscape-mode qwerty keypad depending on application context, while still giving users that reassuring touch confirmation they’d get with a dedicated keyboard.