Thin Touch
Synaptics acquired Pacinian in 2012, and I was part of the team that evaluated their Thin Touch technology as due diligence for the purchase. Once acquired, there was a lot of work to do on the keyboard feel, and we worked closely with the Thin Touch team to refine the user experience. Our goal was to refine the typing experience to perform as well as much thicker keyboard implementations. As a further exploration, we added capacitive sensing to the keyboard and designed a gesture language to deliver useful and usable functionality harnessing the touch capabilities of the keyboard.
Why it matters: The drive to make notebook computers thinner is limited by component thickness, especially keyboard thickness where every millimeter of key travel needed to provide a good typing experience represents two millimeters of added computer thickness. Thin Touch was envisioned as a solution to this problem – providing good typing performance in a very thin form factor, and providing new input modalities by making the entire surface of the keyboard touch sensitive.
Contributions: User testing, DOE, concept design and storyboarding, interaction design, user interface design, prototype casing design, patent applications.
Team: The UX portion of Thin Touch was headed by Dr. Dan Odell and myself, this included feedback on mechanical design as well as the design of a gestural language. We collaborated closely with the UX team: Justin Mockler, Anna Ostberg, Mohammed Sheik-Nainar. The original capacitive keyboard demo was made by CPT: Bjorn Hovden, Andrew Hsu, Mark Huie, Kipling Inscore, and Jerry Shao.
The Thin Touch demo unit.
The Thin Touch demo application UI. The demo showcased 6 different capacitive touch modalities, as well as the thin form factor of the Thin Touch keyboard.
Function preview increases the discoverability of keyboard shortcuts by allowing the user to touch the surface of the keys to display the functionality. (Patent: US9829992B2 Multi-function keys providing additional functions and previews of functions)
Disable on type, or the accidental contact mitigation demo, disables the touchpad whilst typing as a way to deal with accidental contact from the palm or thumbs.
A potpourri of DOE endstops used to heuristically evaluate the bottoming out feel of various keys at various lengths of travel.
Wake on touch, or the Sleep Mode demo, wakes the computer up when the user touches the keyboard.
Keys for testing perceived single key feel.
I’ll briefly mention here that some of our work on keyboards had begun prior to Thin Touch. Shown below is the Bucatini demo, which was the thinnest keyboard we could prototype. It was a one layer sensor with a mylar overlay and simple tactile differentiation between keys. With Bucatini we explored the usability of typing on such a thin keyboard, and used it to benchmark against typing on the tablet screen, competitor’s portable tablet keyboards, and on Thin Touch prototypes. Dr. Odell and I published our findings in a paper for HFES:
The typing performance and preference costs of reducing tactile feedback and tactile landmarks in tablet keyboards. Proc. of the 58th HFES, pp. 1790-94
Bucatini version 1 with simple tactile differentiation.
Bucatini version 2 with embossed tactile cues.