Before the dominance of digital tools, most interface designs used to have a physical surface that users could touch and feel. This physical interaction was a great way to communicate certain affordances to the user. Now, the rise of touchscreens in devices in the last decade and the increasing dependency on such devices has made the interaction between a person and a digital interface important. One of the drawbacks of using digital interfaces is that they rely a lot on the vision of the user. Take, for example, the media system of a modern car. Most controls are embedded inside the touch interface that the driver has to look at to interact with. Operating the vehicle without visual attention becomes essential to decrease potential distractions when engaging in a secondary activity that requires focusing on the center console. This paper aims to address the problem by exploring existing literature to find solutions to improve the tactile experience of current touchscreen technology. This paper concludes with the importance of tactile feedback in touch interfaces and brings forth important factors for creating an effective tactile feedback system. It also explores alternative solutions to provide feedback through external devices, which further enhances interaction by making use of the device’s specific features to provide multi-modal input.
