A research poster from the School of Continuous Improvement moves one button around a mock mobile storefront and records what participants bought that was not on their list.
Forty-eight people shopped a stationery cupboard one-handed while a camera watched for the moment the grip changed
Forty-eight people were each handed a telephone, forty tokens and a short shopping list, and asked to do their shopping with one hand. What the rest of their purchases had to do with the position of a single button is reported in Past the Thumb’s Arc: Reach, Grip Shift and the Unplanned Add on a Mock Mobile Storefront, a research poster by Dr Dagny Okafor, Lecturer and Convenor, Evaluation of Evaluation, Dr Solveig Adeyemi, Lecturer, and Ms Signy Okpara, Doctoral Candidate, all of the School of Continuous Improvement.
The storefront stocked the laboratory’s stationery cupboard, and beside each listed item it offered one that was not on the list. Where the button for that offer sat within the thumb’s ordinary sweep, participants added it 31 per cent of the time. Where reaching it meant shifting the telephone in the hand, they added it 17 per cent of the time. How far the thumb had to travel made no measurable difference on either side.
Nobody in the study was persuaded of anything, and nobody was prevented from anything. They were given a cupboard and a thumb. The School has had both for some years, and it has been a pleasure to see them properly introduced.
— Dr Dagny Okafor, Lecturer and Convenor, Evaluation of Evaluation
The poster brings an established model of pointing effort into alignment with a video-coded account of hand posture, anchoring both to a counterbalanced grid of button positions and a closed token economy. Its authors note that it describes one handset, one hand and one chair, and that it offers no guidance to anyone who builds a shop or uses one.
The University takes a particular satisfaction in a result that can be held in one hand. Dr Adeyemi said the team had “come away with a greater regard for the half-second, which is longer than it sounds”.
The full poster is available from the University’s research repository under an open licence, doi:10.5555/slop.2hrwnx.