User-Defined Gestures for Surface Computing

Overview

This paper was about a study involving user-defined gestures for surface computing and they discuss developing a vocabulary based on the common gestures that users perform without any outside influence. They performed a study where they would show an action on the screen and the user would try to guess the gesture that caused the action. Further, they created a taxonomy, analyzed the results in detail, made observations, and detailed discussions about the experiment & findings that they discovered.

Developing a User-Defined Gesture Set

One idea presented was that users are not designers. They emphasize that care must be taken when building a gesture set using user defined gestures. Testing on a large number of people, they will get the general consensus as to what is the most popular gesture to cause a specific action, but it may not be the best gesture to cause that specific action. Another interesting point is that the feedback from a computer might change the next gesture, or the next primitive step of a gesture. For example, when a user puts his or her hand down, a ripple appears. If the ripple did not appear, they may have taken a different course. This may impact the experiment, but they stated that they removed feedback.

Discussion

• It would be interesting to see a study where the subjects were unaware that the testers were looking for them to provide the most logical gesture to cause an action
• User’s could be giving a UI and told to take make some gesture to cause an action (such as delete, move, cut, etc...) in a “dummy” app, then collect that data-this way the user would naturally try to do some gesture to cause the action
• Integrating past knowledge - learned from single point device - will bias the most “natural” form of gestures: it would be interesting to see if results are the same when people that are not computer literate were tested.
• Mixed UIs:
• Standard computer input along with multi-touch screen: this would be the most practical application for typical computer use. An example would be a small box in the corner with common tasks like cut, copy, paste, etc... (another type of shortcut) or drawing a question mark on the screen for help, drag and drop an item with fingers if a user finds it more convenient than doing it with a mouse, etc...