2012 Volume 14 Issue 3 Pages 271-282
People often read Web pages mainly designed for desktop or laptop computers with small screens on mobile phones or PDAs. But the mode switching between scrolling and other interactions may slow down the interaction when the user is interacting with spatially widely-spread information (e.g, navigating a Web page much larger than the real estate of the screen). In this paper, we present a new method to provide mode switching between scrolling and other operations, such as drawing, with one finger. When the user contacts on a touch screen with a pen or fingertip, the interaction is treated as the drawing operation. When the user touches the screen with the whole finger, the interaction is treated as scrolling. We developed methods to determine the finger 's contact status based on the contact area or subtle movements while the user 's finger stays on the screen. We also built a drawing application which allows the user to switch the mode between scrolling and drawing by the finger's contact status. Our small user studies showed that our methods can distinguish three different modes (pen input, touch with the fingertip, and touch with the whole finger) accurately.
