Mobile HCI ’14: “Are you comfortable doing that?”

OCAD University, who are one of the Mobile HCI '14 hosts, have some fantastic architecture on campus.
OCAD University, who are one of the Mobile HCI ’14 hosts, have some fantastic architecture on campus.

One of my favourite talks from the third day of Mobile HCI ’14 was Ahlstrom et al.’s paper on the social acceptability of around-device gestures [link]. In short: they asked users if they were comfortable doing around-device gestures. I think this is a timely topic because we’re now seeing around-device interfaces added to commercial smartphones. Samsung’s Galaxy S4 had hover gestures over the display and Google’s Project Tango added depth sensors to the smartphone form factor. I feel that now we’ve established ways of detecting around-device gestures, it’s now time to look at what around-device gestures should be and if users are willing to use them.

In Ahlstrom’s paper, which was presented excellently by Pourang Irani, they did three studies looking at different aspects of the social acceptability of around-device gestures. They looked mainly at aspects of gesture mechanics: gesture size, gesture duration, position relative to device, distance from the device. When asking users if they were comfortable doing gestures, they found that users were most happy to gesture near the device (biased towards the side of their dominant hand) and found shorter interactions more acceptable.

They also looked at how spectators perceived these gestures, by opportunistically asking onlookers what they thought of someone who was using gestures nearby. What surprised me was that spectators found around-device gestures more acceptable in a wider variety of social situations than the users from the first studies. Does seeing other people perform gestures make those types of gesture input seem more acceptable?

Tonight I presented my poster [paper link] on our design studies for above-device gesture design. There were some similarities between our work and Ahlstrom’s; purely by coincidence, we both asked users if they were comfortable and willing to use certain gestures. However, we focused on what the gestures were, whereas they focused on other aspects of gesturing (e.g. gesture duration).

In our poster and paper we present design recommendations for creating around-device interactions which users think are more usable and more acceptable. I think the next big step for around-device research is looking at how to map potential gestures to actions and identifying ways of making around-device input better. My PhD research is focusing on the output side of things, looking at how we can design feedback to help users as they gesture using the space near devices. If you saw my poster tonight or had a chat with me, there’s more about the research in our poster here; tonight was fun so thanks for stopping by!