AugIR Meets GestureCards: A Digital Sketching Environment for Gesture-Based Applications

To gain a common understanding of an application’s layouts, dialogs and interaction flows, development teams often sketch user interface (UI). Nowadays, they must also define multi-touch gestures, but tools for sketching UIs often lack support for custom gestures and typically just integrate a basic predefined gesture set, which might not suffice to specifically tailor the interaction to the desired use cases. Furthermore, sketching can be enhanced with digital means, but it remains unclear whether digital sketching is actually beneficial when designing gesture-based applications. We extended the AugIR, a digital sketching environment, with GestureCards, a hybrid gesture notation, to allow software engineers to define custom gestures when sketching UIs. We evaluated our approach in a user study contrasting digital and analog sketching of gesture-based UIs.