Abstract
The demand for point-of-sale (PoS) applications, from public service kiosk to personal mobile devices, has drastically increased since the last decade. PoS applications are a demanding environment that requires the interface to be responsive, accurate and easy to use for anyone. Menus and navigation in applications have traditionally been on the left, but many application developers choose to put them on the right so that the content can have focus on the left. In left-to-right languages, people are used to reading from the left, and so objects on the left hand side get more attention than those on the right. Previous research has shown the benefits of right-handed use for touchscreen mobile phones in several angles, such as performance, usability and user experience. The goal of this study is to investigate the differentiating aspects of left or right-handed user experience through the use of a popular mobile PoS application in Turkey, YemekSepeti, on touchscreen mobile phones. More specifically, this study aims to evaluate the left and right-handed user experience on touchscreen mobile phones regarding an application, which was mainly designed to be used with a defined thumb. For this purpose, a qualitative mobile usability test based on a multi-method approach was conducted with a sample of 8 Turkish college students who defined themselves as iPhone users. The tests were conducted with a predefined smart phone: iPhone 4S. The participants were observed during the task executions and any additional data was collected by the thinking-aloud, eye tracking and video-recording of the participants. After completing the tasks, the participants were interviewed to have further understanding on their thoughts and actions. Findings support the notion that the usability of a touchscreen mobile phone was affected by both handedness and the layout of the applications in terms of entry speed, accuracy rate and inclusive touch interfaces.
Keywords
- User Experience (UX)
- Handedness
- Touchscreen
- Mobile
- Application
Download conference paper PDF
References
Waloszek, G.: Interaction Design Guide for Touchscreen Applications. SAP Design, Newtown Square (2008)
Morris, J.: Android User Interface Development - Beginner’s Guide. Packt Publishing, Birmingham (2011)
comScore.: Touchscreen Mobile Phone Adoption Grows at Blistering Pace in U.S.During Past Year. comScore, Inc., Reston (2009)
Takahashi, D.: Touchscreen market growing 10 times faster than other displays. VentureBeat (2011), http://venturebeat.com/2011/08/17/touchscreen-market-growing-10-times-faster-than-other-displays/ (retrieved January 3, 2014)
Segan, S.: Why I Hate Touchscreens (2009), http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2337575,00.asp (retrieved January 1, 2014)
Weiss, S.: Handheld Usability. John Wiley & Sons, Ltd., New York (2002)
Silfverberg, M., MacKenzie, I.S., Korhonen, P.: Predicting Text Entry Speed on Mobile Phones. In: Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, pp. 9–16 (April 2000)
Perry, K.B., Hourcade, J.P.: Evaluating One Handed Thumb Tapping on Mobile Touchscreen Devices. In: Proceedings of Graphics Interface, vol. 322, pp. 57–64 (May 2008)
Renner, M., Taylor, E.: Analyzing Qualitative Data. Sheboygan, Wisconsin (2003)
Shneiderman, B.: Touch screens now offer compelling uses. IEEE Software 8(2), 93–94, 107 (1993)
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2014 Springer International Publishing Switzerland
About this paper
Cite this paper
Aşçı, S., Rızvanoğlu, K. (2014). Left vs. Right-Handed UX: A Comparative User Study on a Mobile Application with Left and Right-Handed Users. In: Marcus, A. (eds) Design, User Experience, and Usability. User Experience Design for Diverse Interaction Platforms and Environments. DUXU 2014. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 8518. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-07626-3_16
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-07626-3_16
Publisher Name: Springer, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-319-07625-6
Online ISBN: 978-3-319-07626-3
eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)