In a few years, the number of apparatuses with touch panel displays like smartphones will increase. People who are visually impaired, hearing impaired and disabled can use tactile feedback for receiving incoming communications. However, opportunities for tactile feedback applications are limited.
Our hypotheses follow: as there are haptics patterns suitable for use cases, we will design haptics samples of tactile feedback and inspect their effectiveness. This study focuses on haptics patterns showing a relationship between the user’s impression and various use situations. Previous studies have been insufficient, so our target subjects inspected a limited number of objects.
This study consists of two inspections:
1) We collected various haptics patterns that users had defined and analyzed the first inspection. For the next inspection, we manufactured a smartphone prototype. We matched the impression of eight haptics patterns types that we got from the subjects in the first analysis with different situations and tested various replies.
Tests were repeated and recorded for various situations. As different haptics vibrations were added to emails, we inspected whether subjects could distinguish a difference in their meanings. Thus, we added different haptics patterns that corresponded to various situations. We concluded the hypothesis was effective for subjects. We could inspect the hypotheses in relation to subjects’ impressions of the haptics pattern.
2) Additionally, we obtained different results between elders and youths. Consequently, we suggested design guidelines for the new tactile feedback of the smartphone application. We suspect that haptics will be possible for a variety of interactive designs.