We interact with buttons in our everyday life, switching on our televisions, kettles, typing on keyboards and so much more. In fact, after the introduction of mobile phones, the generation of kids that grew up using them have been called the “thumb generation” for their ability to text at lightning speed.
That’s why researchers at Finland’s Aalto University and South Korea’s KAIST wanted to study the many ways humans tap buttons.
“This research was triggered by admiration of our remarkable capability to adapt button-pressing”, Aalto University’s Professor Antti Oulasvirta said in a press release. “We push a button on a remote controller differently than a piano key. The press of a skilled user is surprisingly elegant when looked at terms of timing, reliability, and energy use.
We successfully press buttons without ever knowing the inner workings of a button. It is essentially a black box to our motor system. On the other hand, we also fail to activate buttons, and some buttons are known to be worse than others.”
Pressing real keys vs virtual ones on a touchscreen
In their study the researchers discovered that push buttons, meaning ones that actually depress and spring back, are much more usable than touch buttons. In fact, the best buttons in their estimation are those that trigger only when fully pressed, giving users extremely accurate control of when they’re tapping a key. The researchers say this actually helps improves speed and rhythm, important for musicians and gamers for instance. That’s probably why so many gamers prefer mechanical keyboards to membrane keys.
“The simulations shed new light on what happens during a button press,” the report details. “One problem the brain must overcome is that muscles do not activate as perfectly as we will, but every press is slightly different. Moreover, a button press is very fast, occurring within 100 milliseconds, and is too fast for correcting movement. The key to understanding button-pressing is therefore to understand how the brain adapts based on the limited sensations that are the residue of the brief press event.”
Essentially, what this means is that physical keys are a much better interface than touchscreens when you’re looking for fine control or speed. If you’ve ever played the same game on a mobile and a computer, you know that the latter’s controls will seem more responsive.
Time to bring this back? // Reuters
It’s not that the design of the controls isn’t making an impact, but it’s mostly your brain that really can’t process how best to punch keys on a touchscreen.