Towards the establishment of a framework for intuitive multi-touch interaction design

Abstract

Intuition is an important yet ill-defined factor when designing effective multi-touch interactions. Throughout the research community, there is a lack of consensus regarding both the nature of intuition and, more importantly, how to systematically incorporate it into the design of multi-touch gestural interactions. To strengthen our understanding of intuition, we surveyed various domains to determine the level of consensus among researchers, commercial developers, and the general public regarding which multi-touch gestures are intuitive, and which of these gestures intuitively lead to which interaction outcomes. We reviewed more than one hundred papers regarding multi-touch interaction, approximately thirty of which contained key findings we report herein. Based on these findings, we have constructed a framework of five factors that determine the intuition of multi-touch interactions, including direct manipulation, physics, feedback, previous knowledge, and physical motion. We further provide both design recommendations for multi-touch developers and an evaluation of research problems which remain due to the limitations of present research regarding these factors. We expect our survey and discussion of intuition will raise awareness of its importance, and lead to the active pursuit of intuitive multi-touch interaction design.

Measuring Readiness-to-Hand through Differences in Attention to the Task vs. Attention to the Tool

“…CB occurs due to a failure to notice an obvious change, whereas IB is a failure to notice something unexpected while engaged in a cognitively demanding task. These effects hint at a mechanism in the brain that filters unwanted or unimportant objects in the visual scene when concentrating on a task [19].…”

“…Although several studies have looked at ways to evaluate different types of interaction like direct touch [19], the use of the terms "natural" and "initiative" is somewhat controversial in HCI [15,41] and little work has been dedicated to understanding these constructs. On the one hand, many researchers have designed interaction with the intention of creating natural and intuitive techniques [11,13,14,16,21,25,29,44], and techniques such as elicitation studies [28,31,46] and consideration of the "continuum of knowledge" in the design process [3] have allowed for the creation of gestures that are familiar, and therefore perhaps intuitive and natural.…”

Multi-touch gestures for pre-kindergarten children

“…Ingram et al (2012) also concluded that although the set of multi-touch interactions that users and developers instinctively and unanimously agree upon is small (consisting of only one-finger touch for selection and one-finger drag for movement, and other fundamental tasks), the lack of standardized and universally accepted interactions makes the need for well-designed multi-touch interactions even more crucial.…”

Multi-touch Technology in Early Childhood

“…Moreover, the lack of standardized and universally accepted interactions for these challenging users makes the design of well-designed multi-touch interactions even more crucial [11].…”