Restoring Hover on Touchscreens Using a Mouse Pointer

Keywords: Hover interaction, Tablet mouse pointer, Mobile touchscreen, Virtual pointer, Usability evaluation, User experience

TL;DR: Tablet mouse pointer enables desktop-style hover and click on touchscreens, improving accuracy and reducing occlusion while remaining usable.

Abstract:

Hover is a fundamental interaction mechanism in desktop environments, enabling both visual preview before action and physical hover, where users can rest a finger without triggering input. These capabilities are absent on mobile touchscreens due to the direct nature of touch input, resulting in inconsistencies between the desktop and mobile interaction phases. To address this limitation, we introduce the tablet mouse pointer, a novel technique that restores two-phase interaction: hover followed by tap.
Five participants performed a dynamic star-rating task under three counterbalanced interaction methods—tablet mouse pointer, tablet touch, and laptop mouse—and we measured workload (NASA-TLX), usability (SUS), and quantitative performance. Results show that the tablet pointer improves selection accuracy and reduces unintended input compared to direct touch, while approaching mouse-level precision, with modest increases in temporal and physical demand. This work demonstrates that desktop-style hover can be effectively simulated on mobile devices, offering a promising path to more precise, preview-rich touchscreen interactions.

Submission Number: 251