Jeff
Avery,
PhD
candidate
David
R.
Cheriton
School
of
Computer
Science
Recent technological advances have resulted in a major shift, from high-performance notebook and desktop computers towards smaller, personal devices like smartphones and tablets which rely primarily on touch input. Users of these devices typically have a relatively high level of skill in using multi-touch gestures to interact with them, but the multi-touch gesture sets that are supported are often restricted to a small subset of one and two-finger gestures, such as tap, double tap, drag, flick, pinch and spread.
We introduce enhanced gestures: variants of standard gestures designed to increase the efficiency or expressivity of gestural input languages by modifying the behaviour of familiar gestures in predictable ways. We explore barriers to adoption and user attitudes towards enhanced gestures, introduce a design framework for devising enhanced gestures, and present the design and evaluation of two enhanced versions of pinch-to-zoom.