Not just intuitive

Tangible user interfaces have received increasing attention in recent years. People often describe tangible user interfaces as "more intuitive" interfaces because we have learned how to manipulate physical objects throughout our lifetime. However, after almost 10 years of prototype development and numerous conference papers, tangible user interfaces have had minimal impact on everyday use of computers. Is there anything that prevents tangible user interfaces from becoming more widely used? In order to investigate the effect of tangible user interfaces, we designed a spatial task to compare a paper tangible user interface with a mouse-controlled graphical user interface. Using a within-subjects design, data were collected from 12 subjects who used both interfaces. Results indicated that subjects exhibited better performance (center displacement error and reproduction time) with the paper tangible user interface.