Comments:
Comment 2
Reference Information:
Title: Gesture Search: A Tool for Fast Mobile Data Access
Author: Yang Li
Presentation: UIST 2010/2009
Summary:
Mobile phones' power and storage capacity is increasing, however their accessibility to all this data is not as efficient. Just like personal computers, mobile phones' interfaces are not as efficient for searching data. This article discusses how touch screen gestures are being employed for the process of searching data. However, current gesture systems are somewhat inefficient, since users need to remember the shortcut gestures given to each file. Li discusses how Gesture Search provides a more efficient way to search data, by using shape writing. The user will only need to remember what they are searching for, and start writing part of the file name.
The author provides an example of how the Gesture Search system works. Besides looking at only the gesture characters entered, the system also considers frequency and search history when displaying the matching results (the order they are displayed matters).The author emphasizes this is not only a handwriting recognition technology, but it is couples with searching techniques.
Gesture Search allows for a maximized input area because it overlays the gesture input area on top of the results list. The system implements a mode less input, which means that the system is able to identify if the user is inputting a gesture, or trying to scroll or tap on the results list. In order to separate the GUI and the Gesture Systems, they had to study the difference between the touch traces between the two.
Gesture Search has already been implemented in Java using Android SKD 2.0. An it has been tested in various devices out in the market already. However, the developers did carry out a longitudinal user study with over a hundred mobile phone users before its release. In their study, they collected qualitative data by a user survey, and quantitative data by a log that would save data from each user. The studies revealed that users use this tool the most to find contacts, instead of music, applications, and web page bookmarks. Users noted the current way to invoke Gesture Search was not very convenient, and recommended a few ideas.
Discussion:
The distinction made between gesture recognition only and search techniques is very important. I have only used gesture recognition before with the text input application my phone has, but I think the combination of both is a great idea. This is an interesting application, and the fact that they overlay the touch input with the gesture input is really appealing and it seems to be more effective than just being limited by an input space. Something else I liked was the search history feature and how it enhances the search.
That seems like a really cool system! If they could apply just the handwriting recognition to internet browsers on phones, I think they'd be SO much easier to use!
ReplyDeleteThe search history part almost seemed like how t9 tries to predict the user's word choice by monitoring usage over time. However, t9 can get really dumb about it too. I imagine their implementation doesn't have this issue.
ReplyDelete