Jeff
Avery,
PhD
candidate
David
R.
Cheriton
School
of
Computer
Science
Recent technological advances have resulted in a major shift, from high-performance notebook and desktop computers towards smaller, personal devices like smartphones and tablets which rely primarily on touch input. Users of these devices typically have a relatively high level of skill in using multi-touch gestures to interact with them, but the multi-touch gesture sets that are supported are often restricted to a small subset of one and two-finger gestures, such as tap, double tap, drag, flick, pinch and spread.
In this seminar, we introduce enhanced gestures: variants of standard gestures designed to increase the efficiency or expressivity of gestural input languages by modifying the behavior of familiar gestures in predictable ways. We explore barriers to adoption and user attitudes towards enhances gestures, and present an implementation of an enhanced pinch-to-zoom. Finally, we examine user effectiveness with our new gesture over a five-day period, to determine the cost transitioning users to this new gesture.