Subjective User Experience and Performance with Active Tangibles on a Tabletop Interfaces

We developed active tangibles (Sensators) that can be used in combination with multitouch tabletops and that can provide multisensory (visual, auditory, and vibrotactile) feedback. For spatial alignment and rotation tasks we measured subjective user experience and objective performance with these Sensators. We found that active feedback increased accuracy in both tasks, for all feedback modalities. Active visual feedback yielded the highest overall subjective user experience and preference scores. Our contribution is that active feedback improves subjectively perceived performance and reduces perceived mental workload. Additionally, our findings indicate that users prefer to be guided by visual signs over auditory and vibrotactile signs.