I’ve been chatting to Kevin Arthur of Touch Usability (and Usability Dude at Synaptics in California), who has been filling me in about some of the new developments in tactile feedback. The little rant I was having about “before the act” tactile feedback is actually something that researchers in the field are very aware of and working on. There’s some really interesting research in the CHI’08 paper shown below, which is written by a Glasgow University research group (Hogaan, Brewster & Johnston). Check out page 3 where they talk about “tactons” (tactile icons) and fingertip-over, -click and -slip events. Kevin has pointed out that this approach can’t really be bolted on to the iPhone keyboard UI given the predictive text / hit area adjustment technique it uses. Interesting stuff.