Those look similar!” issues in automating gesture design advice.pdf

“Those Look Similar!” Issues in Automating Gesture Design Advice A. Chris Long, Jr.1 James A. Landay and Lawrence A. Rowe Human Computer Interaction Institute EECS Department Carnegie Mellon University University of California at Berkeley Pittsburgh, PA 15213 Berkeley, CA 94720-1776 chrisl@ {landay, rowe}@ /~chrisl /~{landay, rowe}ABSTRACT1 Today, state-of-the-art user interfaces often include new interaction technologies, such as speech recognition, computer vision, or gesture recognition. Unfortunately, these technologies are difficult for most interface designers to incorporate into their interfaces, and traditional tools do not help designers with these technologies. One such technology is pen gestures, which are valuable as a powerful pen-based interaction technique, but are difficult to design well. We developed an interface design tool that uses unsolicited advice to help designers of pen-based user interfaces create pen gestures. Specifically, the tool warns designers when their gestures will be perceived to be similar and advises designers how to make their gestures less similar. We believe that the issues we encountered while designing an interface for advice and implementing this advice will reappear in design tools for other novel input technologies, such as hand and body gestures. Keywords Pen-based user interfaces, gestures, similarity, perception 1. INTRODUCTION Today, state-of-the-art user interfaces often include new interaction technologies, such as speech recognition, computer vision, or pen gesture recognition.2 Although the creators of these technologies are able to build applications using them, most interface designers are not familiar with these new technologies, and so have difficulty incorporating them into their interfaces. Unfortunately, design tools for traditional graphical user interfaces provide little assistance to designers who want to use these new technologies. One type of assistance that a design tool could provide is to give uns