Hold a deck of cards in one hand and fan it with your thumb. That motion — lateral, thumb-driven, travelling across the face of the object rather than along its length — is the side-push slider.

It is worth separating from the ordinary slider, because the hand does something different. A conventional slider is usually gripped and worked end to end, often with the whole hand involved and the object reorienting as it goes. A side-push slider stays still in the palm. Only the thumb moves, sweeping sideways across a face that is already presented to it.

That difference has consequences. The travel is short, because a thumb sweeping across a palm-held object has perhaps three centimetres of comfortable range. The force available is low, because the thumb is pushing laterally rather than pulling against a grip. And the object can be worked one-handed, in a pocket, without looking — which is a large part of why the family exists.

What it has to get right

Segmentation. Because the travel is short, the interesting question is how many events fit inside it. A side-push with a single breakaway gives you one moment. A densely segmented track gives the thumb a counted rhythm, and the fan-of-cards feeling arrives from the count rather than from the distance covered.

Low friction under low force. A thumb cannot muscle through a sticky track the way a full grip can. Any roughness that a conventional slider would push past becomes the dominant sensation here. This is why the family leans on low-friction track materials — PTFE and POM appear repeatedly — rather than on metal running directly against metal.

Return. The thumb sweeps one way comfortably and returns awkwardly. How the object resets — whether you sweep back, flip it, or let a magnet take it — determines whether the interaction is a loop or a single event you have to set up again.

Feel Map position

Motion linear, agency continuous, travel short, rhythm dense, feedback located almost entirely in the thumb pad. Breakaway force sits lower than most track mechanisms by necessity. Event sharpness and sound vary widely across the family and are where individual objects distinguish themselves. See the Feel Map for the axes.

The thumb-only feedback location is the unusual entry. Most mechanisms spread sensation across several fingers or the whole palm; this one concentrates it in a single contact patch, which makes the family unusually sensitive to fine texture and unusually easy to use unobtrusively.

Objects in this family

• 01EDC GameMackey — double-track side push with thirteen dense segments on a PTFE track, alongside a button module and a bead maze. The segmentation is the point: thirteen counted events inside a thumb sweep.
• Lautie Shuffle — the name states the intent. Not yet documented here.
• BP Mods Price Tag — flat-bodied, thumb-worked. Not yet documented here.

Gap: only one object in this family has a record on this site. Segment counts, travel distances, and breakaway forces have not been measured for any of them, so the description above is qualitative throughout. Lautie Shuffle and BP Mods Price Tag are named on the strength of the motion they use, not on documented internals.

Related

Slider for the parent family. Detent / Click for how segmented travel produces countable events. Surface Notes for why the thumb pad notices texture that other contact points miss.

Mechanism family identified from hand observation across multiple objects. GameMackey construction details are maker-published or archive-sourced. Nothing here is instrumented.