Investigating the effectiveness of peephole interaction for smartwatches in a map navigation task

Abstract

With the increasing availability of smartwatches the question of suited input modalities arises. While direct touch input comes at the cost of the fat-finger problem, we propose to use a dynamic peephole to explore larger content such as websites or maps. In this paper, we present the results of a user study comparing the performance of static and dynamic peephole interactions for a map navigation task on a smartwatch display. As a first method, we investigated the static peephole methaphor where the displayed map is moved on the device via direct touch interaction. In contrast, for the second method - the dynamic peephole - the device is moved and the map is static with respect to an external frame of reference. We compared both methods in terms of task performance and perceived user experience. The results show that the dynamic peephole interaction performs significantly more slowly in terms of task completion time.