Touch, Gesture and Fitts' Law – Comparing Efficiency Across Screen Sizes

One of the most used input modalities is touch. Be it single- or multitouch, in smartphones, laptops or even on big screens - touch is used everywhere, in various types and sizes.

This study is focused on the influence of display size on the performance of translation tasks. 20 participants were asked to perform a simple translation task on three screens with different display sizes. The results show that, due to the increased movement time, larger screens are less performant at higher ID (index of difficulty) values than medium-sized screens.

The error rate for smaller screens is higher than for other display sizes. Therefore, tasks on these screens are perceived as being more difficult. The smaller a screen, the bigger the overshoot with movements downwards as well as to the left.
It was shown that medium-sized screens are perceived as being less exhausting than small or big screens.

This work was published 2019 at the 7th IFIP TC 13 International Conference (INTERACT) under the title
Is Bigger Better? A Fitts’ Law Study on the Impact of Display Size on Touch Performance.