The COVID-19 pandemic created unprecedented questions for touch-based public displays regarding hygiene, risks, and general awareness. We study how people perceive and consider hygiene on shared touchscreens, and how touchscreens could be improved through hygiene-related functions. First, we report the results from an online survey (n = 286). Second, we present a hygiene concept for touchscreens that visualizes prior touches and provides information about the cleaning of the display and number of prior users. Third, we report the feedback for our hygiene concept from 77 participants. We find that there is demand for improved awareness of public displays’ hygiene status, especially among those with stronger concerns about COVID-19. A particularly desired detail is when the display has been cleaned. For visualizing prior touches, fingerprints worked best. We present further considerations for designing for hygiene on public displays.

 

Paper

maekelae2022chi.jpg Ville Mäkelä, Jonas Winter, Jasmin Schwab, Michael Koch und Florian Alt. Pandemic Displays: Considering Hygiene on Public Touchscreens in the Post-Pandemic Era. In Proceedings of the 2022 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. CHI ‘22. Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA. [Download Bibtex]  

    Bildquelle: Foto von Anna Shvets von Pexels