Mouse, touch, or fich: comparing traditional input modalities to a novel pre-touch technique

Finger touch and mouse-based interaction are today's predominant modalities to interact with screen-based user interfaces. Related work suggests that new techniques interweaving pre-touch sensing and touch are useful future alternatives. In this paper, we introduce Fich, a novel pre-touch technique that augments conventional touch interfaces with tooltips and further "fingerover" effects, opening up the space in front of the screen for user interaction. To study Fich in-depth, we developed a Fich-enabled weather application and compared user experience and interface discovery ("serendipity") of Fich against the traditional input modalities Mouse and finger Touch in a user study with 42 subjects. We report on the results, implying Fich's user experience to be rated significantly higher in terms of hedonic quality and significantly lower in terms of pragmatic quality, as compared to traditional input modalities.