FlickWheel: touch sensing flick scrolling with the use experience of ordinary mouse wheels

Abstract

Mouse wheels induce physical fatigue by requiring users to clutch repeatedly when scrolling long distances. Contrarily, modern touchscreen devices allow users to use the flick gesture to conveniently scroll long distances. The aforementioned list interaction technique, namely flick scrolling, continues to scroll the list even after the finger has left the touchscreen and gradually decelerates the scrolling velocity across time by simulating friction. I developed FlickWheel, a mouse wheel interaction that enables flick scrolling by sensing the finger's touch. FlickWheel was evaluated as the most preferred device for scrolling tasks that required scrolling at high speeds. FlickWheel also outperformed the normal mouse wheel in task completion time and number of clutches. Overall, FlickWheel was evaluated with the lowest NASA-TLX score. Finally, possible touch gestures and application to other rotary input devices were explored. The flick-enabled trackball and watch crown were preferred over their flick-disabled counterparts.