Seeking common ground while reserving differences in gesture elicitation studies

Abstract

Gesture elicitation studies have been frequently conducted in recent years for gesture design. However, most elicitation studies adopted the frequency ratio approach to assign top gestures derived from end-users to the corresponding target tasks, which may cause the results get caught in local minima, i.e., the gestures discovered in an elicitation study are not the best ones. In this paper, we propose a novel approach of seeking common ground while reserving differences in gesture elicitation research. To verify this point, we conducted a four-stage case study on the derivation of a user-defined mouse gesture vocabulary for web navigation and then provide new empirical evidences on our proposed method, including 1) gesture disagreement is a serious problem in elicitation studies, e.g., the chance for participants to produce the same mouse gesture for a given target task without any restriction is very low, below 0.26 on average; 2) offering a set of gesture candidates can improve consistency; and 3) benefited from the hindsight effect, some unique but highly teachable gestures produced in the elicitation study may also have a chance to be chosen as the top gestures. Finally, we discuss how these findings can be applied to inform all gesture-based interaction design.