No More Angry Birds!
Toward Better Touchscreen Games for Parrot Enrichment
Rébecca Kleinberger, Jennifer Cunha, Megan McMahon, and Ilyena Hirskyj-Douglas
⭐ Honors: Featured in the New York Times
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About
Touchscreens offer potential for animal enrichment. With advanced cognitive abilities, keen visual perception, and adeptness to engage with capacitive screens using dexterous tongues, parrots are well positioned to benefit from this technology. However, the current human-centric interaction design standards of tablet applications do not optimally cater to the tactile affordances and ergonomic needs of parrots. We conducted a study with 20 pet parrots, examining their tactile interactions with touchscreens and evaluating the applicability of existing HCI interaction models. Our research highlights key ergonomic characteristics unique to parrots, which include pronounced multi-tap behavior, a critical size thresh- old for touch targets, and greater effectiveness of larger targets over closer proximity
Our 3-month study with 20 parrots highlighted key ergonomic characteristics unique to parrots:
The birds’ licks have more drag than human touch
and they touch with lighter pressure
Parrots multitap a lot
We often observe a response lag and retreat behavior in between targets
We identified optimized parameters to improve the birds’ experience
Our findings inform novel guidelines for tailored enrichment systems that meet animals’ unique needs and physiology.
Publication
No More Angry Birds: Investigating Touchscreen Ergonomics to Improve Tablet-Based Enrichment for Parrots Kleinberger, Rebecca, Jennifer Cunha, Megha M Vemuri, Ilyena Hirskyj-Douglas. Proceedings of the 2024 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. 2024, PDF, DOI
🏅 Honors: Featured in The New York Times