Paper Reading #28: Experimental analysis of touch-screen gesture designs in mobile environments

Authors:

Andrew Bragdon, Eugene Nelson, Yang Li, and Ken Hinckle

Occupation:

Andrew Bragdon is currently a PhD student at Brown University.

Eugene Nelson is currently a PhD student at Brown University.

Yang Li is a researcher at Google and holds a PhD from the Chinese Academy of Sciences.

Ken Hinckle is a Principal Researcher at Microsoft Research 

Location:

Published in the CHI '11 Proceedings of the 2011 annual conference on Human factors in computing systems at NYC

Summary

Hypothesis
Bezel and marked gestures can be a better way to increase user performance with mobile touch screens in terms of accuracy and the attention required.

Methods

There were total of fifteen participants that filled out a questionnaire and were instructed on how to do the tasks followed by a demo. Afterwards the users performed tasks to show different levels of distractions and to measure the amount of interaction with a mobile device. The researchers focused on two motor activites: sitting/walking. Both activities were given up to three levels of distraction. The distraction levels were based on how much attention the participants have to give to a different activity. 

Results

In terms of completion time there was very little difference when comparing soft/hard buttons but bezel time has the lowest competition time. During moments of high distractions the Bezel gestures outperformed the soft buttons almost every time. However they both performed about the same in normal conditions.

Content

The paper focuses on the effectiveness of interacting with a mobile touch screen device based on soft/hard buttons and gestures. Much time is spent to see how various elements such as distractions can effect a person's ability to communicate effectively with the device. Based on the results given, the researchers show that direction touch gestures are more accurate when the user is distracted. It was also found that bezel based gestures were most preferred by the participants while mark based gestures were better (speed/accuracy) than free form gestures.

Discussion

I think that this is a interesting topic mostly because i see people make mistakes when their attention is else where and typing with soft buttons. I believe that application of interaction using these gestures can greatly allow accuracy and allow more ease of usage.