Reading #3: “Those Look Similar!” Issues in Automating Gesture Design Advice (Long)

Comment:

Chris aikens

Summary :

This paper introduces an interface design tool, quill, that uses unsolicited advice to help designers to design gestures. Authors notice that it is difficult to design gestures that will be recognized well by the computer due to the similarity of different gestures. In order to handle this problem, they developed quill, to analyze the gestures, find similar gestures and warn designers by showing messages and tell them how to fix the gesture. When training quill, Rubine’s training algorithm was used, and for each type of gesture, ten to fifteen examples were drawn.

In the remaining parts of paper, author shows some challenges about designing this system. When giving advice to designers, there will be some considerations such as advice timing, how much advice to display and advice content. They analyze the designers’ common habits and shows detailed information for how to design system to make is more friendly for designers to use. They also examined long-running operations and gives some optional choices for executing these operations but not make designers confused about it.

Discussion:

The idea showed in this paper is very fresh to me. Despite of the lack of implementation details for the system, it clearly shows us what the system do, how the system works as well as how to make it more friendly for designers. What impressed me most is that it shows me overview of desigining feedback system and the way how to show the feedback to users, which seems very challenging, these concepts can be incorporated into our own system in the future.