Reference Information
Gesture Search: A Tool for Fast Mobile Data Access
Yang Li
Presented at UIST'10, October 3-6, 2010, New York, New York, USA
Author Bio
Yang
Li is currently a Senior Research Scientist working for Google. He
spent time at the University of Washington as a research associate in
computer science and engineering. He holds a PhD in Computer Science
from the Chinese Academy of Sciences.
Summary
Hypothesis
Yang
Li presents several individual hypotheses to test under the primary
goal of demonstrating that Gesture Search is a superior tool for
accessing data in a mobile device. One specific hypothesis is that
GUI-oriented touch input should have less variation in its trajectory
than gestures. Another
hypothesis presented was that Gesture Search would provide a quick and
less stressful way for users to access mobile data.
Methods
To test if gestures were distinguishable from touch events, data was
collected on touch events and gestures, even with gestures outside
Gesture Search's list. Seven participants found contacts and locations
on the phone, yielding over 560 touch events. Gestures were pulled from
published data and users who opted in to sending their data. The authors
measured the squareness of these events.
To test Gesture Search's effectiveness, a longitudinal study was
performed on company Android users. The test was over everyday usage of
the program, with a survey at the end, so data was filtered based on the
level of usage. Data was logged to a server, including the size of the
dataset and actions performed. The number of unique queries versus the
number of unique items accessed was assessed.
Results
This
gesture tool was tested on the android platform and was user tests by
125 different mobile users. From the results it showed that contacts
were mostly searched for using this tool and they were able to obtain
results from two gestures.
Contents
Yang
Li introduces an application called Gesture Search, which is designed
to allow users easier and faster access to elements in their mobile
device by reading gestures drawn on the screen. In particular, he
focuses on in application in areas such as searching for a contact or
tool. The tool runs off of Hidden Markov Models. The application is now in mass use and is available on the Android Market for free.
Discussion
I have actually had some time playing with gesture search as one of my friends took this course last semester and told me about it. While I did appreciate it's capabilities and the features it provides, it proved to be just another shiny app that I used for about 30 minutes but never really touched again.
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