Blog #28: Experimental Analysis of Touch-Screen Gesture Designs in Mobile Environments

Paper Title: Experimental Analysis of Touch-Screen Gesture Designs in Mobile Environments

Authors: Andrew Bragdon, Eugene Nelson, Yang Li and Ken Hinckley

Author Bios:

Andrew Bragdon: is currently a PhD student at Brown Univeristy

Eugene Nelson: is currently a PhD student at Brown Univeristy

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

Ken Hinckley: is a Principal Researcher at Microsoft Research and has a PhD from the University of Virginia

Presentation Venue: CHI '11 Proceedings of the 2011 annual conference on Human factors in computing systems that took place at New York (ACM)

Summary:
Hypothesis: Bezel and marked-based gestures can offer faster, more accurate performance for mobile touch-screen interaction that is less demanding on user attention

How the hypothesis was tested: 15 participants performed a series of tasks designed to model varying levels of distraction and measure their interaction with the mobile device. They studied two major motor activities, sitting and walking, and paired them with three levels of distraction, ranging from no distraction at all to attention-saturating distraction. The participants were given a pre-study questionnaire and instruction on how to complete the tasks in addition to a demonstration.

Results: Bezel marks had the lowest mean completion time, though there was no significant performance difference between soft button's and bezel's paths, but there was a noticeable increase in mean completion time between bezel's paths and hard button paths. Bezel marks and soft buttons performed similarly in direct, and with various distraction types Bezel marks significantly and consistently outperformed soft buttons.

Discussion:
Effectiveness: The authors of this paper accomplished their goal of understanding how distractions can play a role in how users prefer to interact with their devices. I think they did a good job of covering all of the bases and exploring a wide avenue of possibilities.