Your customers want to have a great experience using your product.

A key aspect to that great experience is the performance of the capacitive touch sensor responding only when touched. From a touch sensor standpoint, this means that the sensitivity to a touch needs to be just right, just like Goldilocks would have it. If the sensitivity is too high or too low, your customer will likely get frustrated. If your customer is frustrated with their touch/user-experience, they will be frustrated with your product overall – regardless of how well the rest of your device works.

If:

• people were identical
• the environment never changed
• manufacturing could produce absolutely identical units

Then:

a poor user experience would never happen as the system could be tuned to function perfectly with unchanging conditions.

Unfortunately, people are not the same, conditions do vary and assembly requires some tolerance. Combined, it is very difficult to tune the device to function in all conditions.

As a simple example: a person with calloused, dry fingers will look electrically very different to the touch screen than a person with sweaty hands. The dry hands are less sensitive, and the touch screen should be tuned with increased sensitivity to properly work for that person. However, if the touch screen is too sensitive, the person with sweaty hands could trigger a false touch when a touch was not intended (when a sweaty finger gets close to the touch screen but doesn’t actually touch it.) A compromise must be made so that the touch interface works with both types of users.  Another great example is a touch panel that might be used outdoors. In the summer, users will have bare fingers to touch the panel, however in the winter they don’t want to take off their gloves. Will your touch interface panel work in both situations?

Commonly reported problems when an application suffers from sensor sensitivity issues:

❒ Product returns for inconsistent touch screen performance

❒ Product returns state that the touch screen does not work, but it tests OK when analyzed

❒ Product appears to work for some people and not for others

This is an excerpt from our new Ebook, “Finding the Best Touch Sensor for Your Application”. {{cta(‘bae4e3b9-5903-42c8-9445-6506d29b02a8’)}}