Computer scientists studied how the size and shape of hands and fingers influence the accuracy of the user’s touch performance on the phone. They found people with long thumbs are more likely to make errors on their touchscreens.
“Our study demonstrates that long thumbs alone can explain 12% of all the errors made [by] users that had to hit certain targets on the screen while holding the phone with one hand,” says Henning Pohl, a postdoc in the computer science department at the University of Copenhagen.
He and a group of computer science students are the first to put a number on how hand shape influences accuracy.
Big Hands and Thick Fingers
The conventional wisdom has been that big hands or thick fingers are to blame for the majority of errors. But that’s not the case, according to the researchers.
“It’s the length of your thumb, not its thickness, that makes the big difference,” Pohl says.
People with long thumbs are particularly challenged when it comes to accuracy at the bottom of the screen. The experiments demonstrate that the longer your thumb, the harder it is to guide it with precision in the lower corners.
“Even though we are constantly using touch technology, no one really knows why we users make the mistakes that we do. Neither do the big phone manufacturers—who settle for identifying and correcting errors rather than finding out what causes them. We hope that our research can help change that,” says Pohl.
Researchers conducted the trials with 27 participants, each equipped with two differently sized smartphones—an iPhone 6 and a Nexus 6P. A ..
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