Paper Reading #8: Gesture Search: A tool for fast mobile data access

Reference Information: 
Gesture Search: A tool for fast mobile data access by Yang Li.  

Published in the UIST '10 Proceedings of the 23nd annual ACM symposium on User interface software and technology.

Author Bio:
Yang Li is a researcher at Google who attended University of Washinton. He has a PhD in computer science that he got while in China.


Summary:
Hyphothesis:
That new ways to have users be able to interact with a touch surface would be much more effective than previously used ways, specifically that GUI-oriented touch input should have less variation than gestures . To be able to better recognize both actions with a pen or touch when drawing, as well as coming up with different ways to more effectively construct a keyboard.


Methods:
Because this is a test of comparison to currently existing technologies, the first step was to collect data on both. He would have users input various GUI interactions as well as gesture actions and then compared the results. He then deployed it over the android interface in an attempt to gather more data from a wider pool of users, as well as see how it transitioned over to a mobile device.


Results:
The results were, overall, pretty much what were expected from the paper. The GUI interations did far better than the gesture ones, although there were several aspects that, if expanded on, that Gestuer Search could evolve to become better than. It was also interesting that the data showed that 84% of searches involved only one gesture, and 98% had two gestures or less. This shows that searches could be done pretty easily, with minimal input from the users.


Contents:
Gesture Search is a way that users can better interact with touch devices both moble and something like a surface. It attempts to use gestures to gain information from the user rather than the typical GUI interactions that we currently use today. Ultimately this is suppose to be focused, i believe, on a type of text input system. This would be a great application to be able to essentially be able to write out what it is you're trying to say, rather than having to type it out. This was shown in the tests for the android users and the data that was gathered there that, while this is a cool concept, it still is not as well developed as the current GUI system.


Discussion:
As an android user, i could see how this software could be very useful. Many tasks on smartphones currently require a lot of input or typing, but having a way to simplify that process would be a huge advantage. It is about getting as much from your input as possible and using it most effectively. While the current state of smartphone UI seems to be pretty solid, something like this is pretty out of the box and has the potential to be something that could be more widely used.