Understanding How Mobile Interactions Shape Grasp and Contact Patterns Beyond the Touchscreen

The way users hold a smartphone depends on the interaction task, yet little is known about the fingers’ engagement with the device’s surfaces beyond the touchscreen. Such an understanding not only opens up opportunities for novel on- and off-screen interactions, but also the device’s possible physical affordances. We present a study (N=23) that examines the hands’ physical engagement with the smartphone beyond the touchscreen across nine mobile interactions. Grasps were annotated from photographs, and contact regions were captured using residual heat traces from grasping the device. Our findings show that fingers and palms adopt a variety of support roles and postures when engaging with the smartphone’s back and side edges. The hand-contact maps reveal distinct patterns, differing in contact frequency and placement. This work contributes an empirical characterisation of hands’ back and edge engagement, highlighting design opportunities for future smartphone usage extending beyond the touchscreen.

Citation

C. Stellmacher, L.T. Dratzidis, A. Zenner, I.Y. Wald, J. Schoning, Y. Rogers , et al., "Understanding How Mobile Interactions Shape Grasp and Contact Patterns Beyond the Touchscreen," 2026, pp. 1-20.

Source

CHI '26: Proceedings of the 2026 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems

Conference

2026 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems

Keywords

46 Information and Computing Sciences, 4608 Human-Centred Computing

Source

2026 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems

Publisher

Association for Computing Machinery

DOI

10.1145/3772318.3790565

Additional links

https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3772318.3790565