Understanding shortcut gestures on mobile touch devices

Touch gestures become steadily more important with the ongoing success of touch screen devices. Compared to traditional user interfaces, gestures have the potential to lower cognitive load and the need for visual attention. However, nowadays gestures are defined by designers and developers and it is questionable if these meet all user requirements. In this paper, we present two exploratory studies that investigate how users would use unistroke touch gestures for shortcut access to a mobile phone's key functionalities. We study the functions that users want to access, the preferred activators for gesture execution, and the shapes of the user-invented gestures. We found that most gestures trigger applications, letter-shaped gestures are preferred, and the gestures should be accessible from the lock screen, the wallpaper, and the notification bar. We conclude with a coherent, unambiguous set of gestures for the 20 most frequently accessed functions, which can inform the design of future gesture-controlled applications.

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