Paper Reading #23: User-defined Motion Gestures for Mobile Interaction

Reference Information
 User-defined Motion Gestures for Mobile Interaction by Jaime Ruiz, Yang Li, Edward Lank.  Published in the CHI '11 Proceedings of the 2011 annual conference on Human factors in computing systems.

Author Bios

• Jaime Ruiz is currently a fifth-year doctoral student in the HCI Lab in the Cheriton School of Computer Science at the University of Waterloo.
• 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.
• Edward Lank holds a Ph.D. in Computer Science from Queen's University.  He is currently  an Assistant Professor in the David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science at the University of Waterloo

 Summary
Hypothesis
The hypothesis is that the researchers will develop a standard for motion gestures that is useful to mobile developers and hardware makers as well as the users that will be able to finally use motion gestures in an intuitive way.

Methods
20 participants were asked to design and perform a motion gesture with a smartphone device that could be used to execute a task on the smartphone.  These gestures were then analyzed and several were selected to be included in the rest of the study.  In the following experiment, the participants were given a set of tasks and and a set of motion gestures.  The participants performed each gesture and rated them based on how well the gesture matched the task and how easy it was to perform.  
 
Results
The gestures designed by the participants tended to be normal and intuitive. A lot of the gestures tended to mimic a interaction as if doing so with a real physical object as well. Tasks considered opposites usually results in gestures that were quite similar.
 
Contents
This user-defined set of gestures has many implications that the researchers discussed. First of all is supporting a standard set of gestures like the ones described in this study on all platforms so as to establish consistency. Adjusting how mobile OS's recognize gestures would also be beneficial in accomplishing this because the gestures should always be recognized without fail.
 
Discussion

I liked the direction this research was heading by asking the users what things they want to have done and then doing them. Would like to see more though.