Touchscreens as the de facto interface to complex systems

Touchscreens have become the de facto interface for mobile devices and are rapidly becoming the standard way to interact with complex systems across a variety of domains. Today, car dashboards, hospital medical machinery and factory production line control systems, among others, are commonly controlled through touchscreens. Whilst touchscreen interfaces generally perform well in controlled indoor environments, their use in the wild brings a variety of new challenges and requirements, ranging from eyes-free usage, use whilst encumbered with other equipment, environmental issues such as rain, parallax error due to the use of protective and vandalism-proof touchscreens, use whilst wearing gloves and secondary use whilst engaged in a primary task. In this chapter, we bring together work addressing in-the-wild applications of touchscreens, highlighting challenges relevant for designers of complex touchscreen-controlled systems. We discuss the accuracy with which users interact with touchscreens, problems caused by parallax errors and the propensity of touchscreens for accidental input. Finally, we present a case study exploring novel touchscreen input mechanisms in a car dashboard context.