- Paper: Gesture avatar: a technique for operating mobile user interfaces using gestures
- View paper here.
- Authors:
- Hao Lu, Computer Sceince and Engineering at University of Washington
- Yang Li with Google Research
- Presented at the 23rd annual ACM symposium on User interface software and technology.
- Hypothesis: Can a gesture-based method of selecting small items on a touch screen be feasible and user-friendly?
- Methods: To test the hypothesis, Lu and Li implemented an optimized version of a previously released method called Shift. The application was written on the android phone and was tested by 20 participants. Lu and Li had the participants use both Shift and Gesture Avatar (10 using Shift first and 10 using GA first) using different sized targets, different numbers of targets, and sitting vs walking.
- Results: It turned out that the Gesture Avatar was quicker than Shift in finding larger sized items, but slower with smaller items. With Shift, walking significantly increased the error rate, but walking had no effect on the Gesture Avatar's error rate. both of these results were consistent with their hypotheses. A strong majority of participants preferred Gesture Avatar over Shift.
Summary
This article introduces Gesture Avatar, a method of drawing gestures on a smartphone that acts as a larger form of a button that might be too small to click on. This addresses the "fat-finger" problem and the finger occlusion problem, which can cause people to click on the wrong link on their phone. Lu and Li's solution is an updated version of Shift, which allows a user to draw a gesture in the shape of the first letter of the link, search for the appropriate link, and use the gesture as a representative of the button. The major improvements
made included adding a positioning algorithm that not only finds appropriate links, but the closest one as well, reducing the error. In the future, they plan to implement a way for the avatar to find moving objects.
My View
When I use an iPhone / iPod / Android / any small touchscreen, I have my own solution to the "fat-fingered" problem. I zoom in on the link I want to click until I can't miss, and then I click on it. So initially, my thought was that I have no need for this because it really doesn't seem to make a difference in terms of either time or ease of strokes. But then I realized the other things it could be used for, especially selecting a particular letter when writing text. I tell you, there are not many things more frustrating than typing on an iPhone, especially dealing with typos. In addition, the added feature to catch moving objects really intrigues me, because if I zoom in on a moving object, it goes off the screen and I have to chase it. So while I'm not sure if I would ever use this for tiny links, I think they might be on to something here when it comes to usage on a smart phone in general.
