Touchscreen vibration has been affecting user experience
 

Hi there,
I've had my N900 device for about 9 months, and since the first few days that I had the device, I've had touchscreen vibration enabled.

I had to use my wife's N900 last night, and although I've used it before, the lack of touchscreen vibration stood out. The interface was much more responsive, presses were much more accurate, and overall useability was improved.

I don't remember this much of a difference when I first enabled the setting, and am wandering what other users views are? Is it possible (or rather has anyone noticed) a change between PR1.1.1 to PR1.2?

Cheers,

travla

edit: I have now disabled touchscreen vibration and can confirm that the affects are identical on my device.

Re: Touchscreen vibration has been affecting user experience
 

I've used my N900 without touch vibration for 2 weeks, a while ago, I didn't notice any accuracy improvements (didn't check it) or anything similar.

I do remember that it felt more natural. I think it would also feel less accurate, or at least strange, when your doorknob trembles when you grab it.

Touch vibration feels like an extra step in between to me, but I like to keep it on, because I'm not always sure my N900 registered a press under high cpu load. A confirming tremble is pretty nice sometimes :)

Maybe it's just psychological, without vibration it feels more direct, which adds to the user experience.

Re: Touchscreen vibration has been affecting user experience
 

I need a "feedback" when a I use such a touchscreen, though I would prefer a alternate kind of feedback. The sound is a bit annoying and the vibration eats battery.

I would prefer a short "blink" of the RGB LED, that uses kinda no power, is silent but enough to inform the user that he made a "touch". Is there a possibility to do that?

Re: Touchscreen vibration has been affecting user experience
 

@Berserk
You may be right, could be psychological, very hard to quantify across different users.

@Crogge
The sound hasn't bothered me yet, but I'll reserve my judgement after a few more days of use.

Re: Touchscreen vibration has been affecting user experience
 

I like it but I disabled it because mypaint is unusable with it. Is there a way to configure it per application?

However I would be happy if it didn't vibrate on scroll start.
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WEB SHOWS

Re: Touchscreen vibration has been affecting user experience
 

The GConf key for the touch vibration seems to be:
When I set it to false, it doesn't vibrate anymore, but when using the settings menu, the following key is also adjusted:
Changing this key doesn't have a direct effect on the vibration, I'm not sure what it does then. There might be more to this :)

It should be easy to write a daemon (shell script?), that checks for a certain running process, and changes the vibration key when that process is running. A settings menu entry would be good for this.

I'd like to make such an app/daemon, but then I need to do a fair bit of research about how to do it :D

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By the way, I found this GConf key easily with my new Config Reader app!
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Re: Touchscreen vibration has been affecting user experience
 

both excellent points.
it would also be good to actually have a (configurable) rumble which occurs when scrolling itself is underway.
I once pondered wind noise, or book page flipping as the scrolling occured ;)