It must be the ultimate clichéd description of the caffeinated Seattleite: coffee in right hand, personal digital assistant in left. The image is so stereotypically simple that it can’t be accurate—unless you look around the city and learn that, yes, as a matter of fact, it is.

That particular practice has spread far and wide, of course, and in each such scenario, there is a stylus, sheathed and inaccessible because human beings have but two hands. Humans are, however, an adaptable lot, and what invariably happens is the stylus stays tucked away, and the human thumb becomes the input apparatus.

Problem solved—almost. As known by anybody who has tried to take such advantage of a device’s touch screen, thumbs and fingers are not the most adept tools for navigating through a handful of small-display pixels. Time to set down that coffee cup, right?

Wait just a minute, suggests Patrick Baudisch, researcher for Microsoft Research Redmond.

Baudisch, working with former intern Dan Vogel, has devised a solution, called Shift, that enables accurate, finger-based input to operate mobile devices effectively. That, it seems, is what people on the go—and those who need to be productive while quaffing their periodic jolt—really need.

The research project is described in a paper entitled Shift: A Technique for Operating Pen-Based Interfaces Using Touch. The paper received a Best Paper award for CHI, the annual Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, which began April 28 in San José, Calif., and runs through May 3.

“While we tend to think of the PDA as a stylus-based device,” he says, “many people use it with their bare hands. When you watch people use their PDAs, they’re actually using the thumb of the same hand that’s holding the device to operate it.”

It’s important, Baudisch observes, to cater to the way people actually use technology, not merely to the way product designers expect them to use it.

“In many ways,” he says, “it doesn’t matter what we think we’re designing for. This is what users have decided they want this device to be. They’ve decided they want it to be a touch device.”

The Shift project examines the challenges, the techniques, and the opportunities inherent in that user preference.

The functionality is there; the touch screen is what enables people to use a stylus with such devices. And the need for both hands is not the only reason why people sometimes eschew the stylus. Retrieving it takes time, an effort that can seem impractical when only a brief interaction is desired, such as checking a calendar. It’s much easier to just use a finger.

The stylus, Baudisch notes, does have its advantages.

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