OmniScroll: Assisting Selection on Mobile Devices with Large Touchscreen using Scroll Gesture

Abstract

Performing tasks on large touchscreen mobile devices with only single hand involves difficulty in reaching some parts of the screen. The problem also occurs in selection tasks on the pages with long content, especially when the top and the bottom of the content contains commonly used targets. We conducted a user study to investigate users’ single-handed scrolling and touching behaviors on long content and found a significant correlation between starting points of scroll gestures and touch points for target selections. From this finding, we designed OmniScroll and OmniScroll+, novel mobile interaction techniques that assist single-handed selection tasks using a scroll gesture as an extension of scrolling content. The techniques dynamically determined the Control-Display ratio to bring the screen to personalized comfortable position with one single scroll gesture. Our comparative evaluation shows that users can select targets quickly and comfortably with our methods and the methods are effective and applicable for both scrollable and non-scrollable contents.