Interaction Styles in Context: Comparing Drag-and-Drop, Point-and-Touch, and Touch in a Mobile Spelling Game

The choice of appropriate interaction style for children's application has been a divisive subject of debate. For example, drag-and-drop is often said to perform worse than point-and-click in educational applications -- and vice versa. In this paper, we argue for the need to choose the interaction style in context, considering a range of factors. We compare drag-and-drop, point-and-touch, and simple touch for selecting letters to form words in a spelling line as part of an educational spelling game. We evaluate the perceived workload, user experience, preference, and writing times of twenty-five children (8-11 years), eight of whom were dyslexic. We found that touch received better ratings and was ranked highest most often on all subscales compared to drag-and-drop and point-and-touch. Children needed less time using touch and 68% chose it as their favorite interaction style. We also found small advantages for drag-and-drop over point-and-touch, which runs counter to some recent recommendations. This becomes particularly clear when using ranking responses, which support a particularly fine-grained picture.