Reading #24: Gesture avatar: a technique for operating mobile user interfaces using gestures

References:

Gesture avatar: a technique for operating mobile user interfaces using gestures by Hao Lu and Yang Li.  

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

Author Bios:

Yang Li is a research scientist working for Google.

Hao Lu is a graduate student at the University of Washington.

Summary:

Hypothesis:

That users can create their own avatars to enable them to better provide precise touch input to small areas of the screen.

Methods:

The authors developed a system called the Gesture Avatar. This allowed for the user to create an avatar which was bound to a location on the screen. The first test that they conducted was having users select one letter out of a series by drawing an avatar. The second test was having users select a target on the screen. Both of these tests were also conducted with the user walking while attempting them. 

Results:

Gesture Avatar was slower than is competitor for large target sizes, but much faster for smaller sizes. Both of the systems increased with size, but SHIFT increased at a faster rate. 

Contents:

In this paper the researches test the Gesture Avatar system. They have users attempt to select small portions of a mobile device by drawing their own avatar on the screen and selecting it.

Discussion:

I feel like this could be really useful. I have often had problems with selecting small regions of my phones screen and something like this could really come in handy. It seems much more intuitive and easy than the current method of having to zoom in to select the link or object.