More work with my University of Maryland collaborators, including assistant professor Leah Findlater, has been accepted for publication! Look for our short paper “Understanding Child-Defined Gestures and Children’s Mental Models for Touchscreen Tabletop Interaction” to appear at the upcoming Interaction Design and Children (IDC) 2014 conference. We extended prior work by Jacob O. Wobbrock and colleagues in a paper from CHI 2009 on eliciting gesture interactions for touchscreen tabletops directly from users themselves; in our case, we asked children to define the gestures, and compared them to similar gestures designed by adults. Here is the abstract:
Creating a pre-defined set of touchscreen gestures that caters to all users and age groups is difficult. To inform the design of intuitive and easy to use gestures specifically for children, we adapted a user-defined gesture study by Wobbrock et al. [12] that had been designed for adults. We then compared gestures created on an interactive tabletop by 12 children and 14 adults. Our study indicates that previous touchscreen experience strongly influences the gestures created by both groups; that adults and children create similar gestures; and that the adaptations we made allowed us to successfully elicit user-defined gestures from both children and adults. These findings will aid designers in better supporting touchscreen gestures for children, and provide a basis for further user-defined gesture studies with children.
You can see the camera-ready version of the paper here. The conference will be held in Aarhus, Denmark (home of LEGO!). Unfortunately, I won’t be attending, but first-author (and graduating Master’s student) Karen Rust will present the paper at the conference. Look for her in the short paper madness session, and the poster session!
Lisa Anthony 