05.20.2010
Dan Mauney /
Gesture Research
As mentioned in Protocol – Part 1: Equipment, we used 40 participants, 20 of which were novices to touchscreen interfaces and did not own a touchscreen device and 20 of which were experts and did own a touchscreen handheld device. To analyze whether there were differences between the novices and the experts, we calculated Jacaard two-way agreement scores for each Action for both Novices and Experts.
A Jacaard two-way agreement score is a measure of the similarity or differences within a set of data. It ranges from 0 to 1. If all the items within a dataset differ, the score will be a 0. If all the items within a dataset are exactly the same, the score will be a 1. Thus, higher scores indicated greater similarity of items in the dataset, and thus higher agreement.
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05.20.2010
Dan Mauney /
Gesture Research
The next question is: were there cultural differences in the participant created gestures? We ran a number of different analyses to help us answer this question.
The first analysis we ran is: did one country use certain gestures more than any other country? To answer this question, we analyzed the top 38 gestures (gestures that had more than 40 people use them) and ran a chi-squared analysis to identify if one country used that gesture more than another. There were no significant differences found in that analysis. Thus, this analysis did not identify any significant differences between countries in their use of the top gestures.
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04.22.2010
Dan Mauney /
Gesture Research
Once all the data reduction was completed, one of the primary questions we had was, what gestures did participants create the most frequently?
To find out the answer to this question, we first sorted the data from most frequent to least frequent. This resulted in a data table that shows the gestures created, the number of people in each country that created that gesture, the number of experts and novices who created that gesture, and the total number of participants overall who created that gesture, all sorted from most frequent to least frequent.
When looking at the data, we wanted to know, statistically, which gesture(s) were created the most often (which we termed the “winner”) and which gestures were created the least often (which we termed the “tail”).
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04.14.2010
Dan Mauney /
Gesture Research
WARNING: This blog is a detailed description of the data reduction steps and is not suitable for all audiences. Parental discretion is advised. These are professionals; do not try this at home.
The result of the data collection yielded a detailed spreadsheet of all unique gestures (Gesture Glossary) and a results spreadsheet of all the gestures each participant made for each action in every country.
In all, we had 40 participants in 8 countries and 20 participants in 1 country create gestures for 28 actions, yielding over 9,500 gestures in total. Each of these gestures were catalogued according to the lexicon defined by the research team.
As noted in Data Structure, the lexicon collected very detailed information about each gesture. This detail will prove useful in many analyses. However, for certain types of data analyses, not all of the detail is needed. At times, the detail of the information resulted in gesture differences that were not meaningful. For example, when someone selects a word to cut or copy, it isn’t significant which direction they swipe to highlight that word. Another example: when someone is performing a page-level command (like scrolling), it doesn’t necessarily matter if they perform that gesture over an object or over whitespace. So, we undertook an effort to combine gestures when the differences between them are not meaningful for a particular action.
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11.18.2009
Dan Mauney /
Consumer Products /
Mobile /
Trends
I am a relatively new user to the iPhone, having just purchased one this summer. I bought the iPhone primarily on the promise of 3rd party applications making my life easier. Switching to AT&T from Verizon was difficult because the network coverage of Verizon is so much better where I live and travel, but I was ready to make use of these 3rd party Internet-enabled applications to improve my life.
All-in-all, the iPhone has delivered on that promise. Nothing demonstrated that better than a recent trip to Paris. I have done a bit of international travel, but this was to be my first time to France. France is famous for not wanting to speak English to tourists and I don’t know a lick of French and I was traveling alone, so I did more than my usual preparations for this trip.
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11.01.2009
Dan Mauney /
Gesture Research
Once the data was collected, the researchers reviewed all the videos of the gestures and classified them according to a detailed lexicon defined by the research team.
To help maintain consistency across researchers, all unique gestures were catalogued and uploaded to an online gesture glossary. Tables 1 and 2 below show the data collected for each unique gesture in the gesture glossary.
Early researchers uploaded many unique gestures to the online gesture glossary, while later researchers were able to compare the gesture made by their participants to the gesture pictures in the glossary and re-use the same gesture ID and description.
All gestures were reviewed and entered into the results spreadsheet, the structure of which is shown in Table 3. Because most of the detail describing the gesture is contained in the online gesture glossary, the values entered into the results spreadsheet were limited to the minimum number of items to classify the gesture and enable the data analyses.
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11.01.2009
Dan Mauney /
Gesture Research
As mentioned in the Gesture Reserach – Protocol (Part 2: Session Flow), participants were asked to perform 28 action. This blog provides a description and the “before” and “after” screens of each action
Here are a few key instructions to all moderators who ran this study:
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10.24.2009
Dan Mauney /
Gesture Research
Once we settled on the equipment and the general approach, we then developed the detailed protocol and piloted it in the US and Germany. After this pilot, the study protocol was updated with lessons learned and best practices and provided to the remaining countries.
As mentioned in the Gesture Research – Protocol (Part 1: Equipment) blog, participants were asked to define their own gesture for 28 actions. The 28 actions were:
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10.16.2009
Dan Mauney /
Gesture Research
While the concept for the study was simple, this was a challenging study to design and ensure repeatability of the protocol when conducting the study across 9 different countries with 9 different test teams. The equipment played an important role in accomplishing this.
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10.16.2009
Dan Mauney /
Gesture Research
340 people defined their own touchscreen-based gestures for 28 actions (like scroll, rotate, cut, copy, paste) across 9 countries, totaling over 9,500 gestures. What can we learn from this?
A lot.
Some believe we have entered a new era in interaction design. For many years we’ve been using the mouse, pointstick, touchpad, and of course, the keyboard. A new interaction convention is gaining popularity now that makes use of the whole human body.
This is the first in a series of blogs about gesture research conducted by the International Usability Partners (IUP). As this research is conducted, analyses and conclusions will be posted here as they are completed. The first couple blogs will provide the background, protocol, and data collection methods. Future blogs will contain the analyses and results.
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