Agile Search: A tool for searching apps easily on mobile by gesture

Enabling fast access to apps is important to smartphone users especially when there are a large number of apps installed on their devices. Several gesture based search approaches have been proposed to increase the search efficiency and accuracy with improved convenience, but their gesture-app mapping mechanism still largely relies on the textual information of apps. This means such methods can become less effective when a user is trying to locate rarely used apps as they may not be able to recall any textual cues about the app. Since apps are appeared as icons with text descriptions on a device’s screen, there may have other cues that can be used to inform gestures for shortcut access to apps to overcome current text based search/mapping limitations. An initial study involving 24 participants to understand the impact of app icon designs on creating gestures as app shortcuts has been conducted. The results show that users not only tend to use visual cues presented in app icons to create gestures, but also create them based on apps’ usage frequency and different icon types.

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Author and article information

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Chi Zhang

Conference

Publication date: July 2016

Publication date (Print): July 2016

Pages: 1-6

Affiliations

[0001]Bournemouth University

P521 Pool House Bournemouth

University BH1 25BB

Article

DOI: 10.14236/ewic/HCI2016.12

SO-VID: 4d2af624-60b7-442e-88fa-33a32be3f815

Copyright statement: © Zhang. Published by BCS Learning and Development Ltd. Proceedings British HCI 2016 - Fusion, Bournemouth, UK

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This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 Unported License. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Conference name: Proceedings of the 30th International BCS Human Computer Interaction Conference

Conference acronym: HCI

Conference number: 30

Conference location: Bournemouth University, Poole, UK

Conference date: 11 - 15 July 2016

Conference sponsor: Electronic Workshops in Computing (eWiC)

Conference theme: Fusion

Product

Product Information: 1477-9358BCS Learning & Development

Self URI (article page): https://www.scienceopen.com/hosted-document?doi=10.14236/ewic/HCI2016.12

Self URI (journal page): https://ewic.bcs.org/

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Comments

Comment on this article

[1] Apple 2015 Use Search on your iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch [online] Available at https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201285> 07 March 2016

[2] Appsfire 2015 Infographic: iOS Apps vs. Web Apps [online] Available at http://blog.appsfire.com/infographic-ios-apps-vs-web-apps/> 07 March 2016

[3] J. Aron 2011 How innovative is Apple's new voice assistant, Siri? New Scientist 212 2836 24

[4] M. BöhmerA. Krüger 2013 April A study on icon arrangement by smartphone users Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems 2137 2146 ACM

[5] Emarket 2015 Over half of mobile phone users globally will have smartphones in 2018 [online] Available at http://www.emarketer.com/Article/2-Billion-Consumers-Worldwide-Smartphones-by-2016/1011694 07 March 2016

[6] Jakob 2014 Icon Classification: Resemblance, Reference, and Arbitrary Icons [online] Available at https://www.nngroup.com/articles/classifying-icons/> 07 March 2016

[7] A. Kendon 1988 How gestures can become like words Cross-cultural perspectives in nonverbal communication 1 131 141

[8] Krista 2015 Making your app work: Moving apps from Rarely to Always Used.Solstice [online] Available at http://www.solstice-mobile.com/blog/making-your-app-work-for-you> 07 March 2016

[9] Y. Li 2010 October Gesture search: a tool for fast mobile data access InProceedings of the 23nd annual ACM symposium on User interface software and technology 87 96 ACM

[10] Y. Li 2012 May Gesture-based interaction: a new dimension for mobile user interfaces In Proceedings of the International Working Conference on Advanced Visual Interfaces 6 6 ACM

[11] H. LuY. Li 2015 April Gesture On: Enabling Always-On Touch Gestures for Fast Mobile Access from the Device Standby Mode InProceedings of the 33rd Annual ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems 3355 3364 ACM

[12] D.L.B. LuluT. Kuflik Wise Mobile Icons Organization: Apps Taxonomy Classification using Functionality Mining to Ease Apps Finding

[13] W. McGrathY. Li 2014 October Detecting tapping motion on the side of mobile devices by probabilistically combining hand postures InProceedings of the 27th annual ACM symposium on User interface software and technology 215 219 ACM

[14] M.R. MorrisJ.O. WobbrockA.D. Wilson 2010 May Understanding users' preferences for surface gestures In Proceedings of graphics interface 2010 261 268 Canadian Information Processing Society

[15] M.A. NacentaY. KamberY. QiangP.O. Kristensson 2013 April Memorability of pre-designed and user-defined gesture sets In Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems 1099 1108 ACM

[16] Ofcom 2015 Ofcom 2015 Communications Market Report [online] Available at http://stakeholders.ofcom.org.uk/binaries/research/cmr/cmr15/CMR_UK_2015.pdf 07 March 2016

[17] Ofcom 2014 Over half of smartphone apps downloaded are rarely used [online] Available at http://www.v3.co.uk/v3-uk/news/2342180/over-half-of-smartphone-apps-downloaded-are-never-used-ofcom-finds 07 March 2016

[18] U. OhL. Findlater 2013 April The challenges and potential of end-user gesture customization In Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems 1129 1138 ACM

[19] T. OuyangY. Li 2012 May Bootstrapping personal gesture shortcuts with the wisdom of the crowd and handwriting recognition In Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems 2895 2904

[20] S. Perez 2011 App-ocalypse, TechCrunch [online] Available at http://techcrunch.com/2011/12/18/app-ocalypse/ 07 March 2016

[21] Samsung 2011 Samsung Sunburst [online] Available at http://www.samsung.com/us/consumer/mobile/mobile-phones/at-t-phones/SGHA697ZKAATT/index.idx?pagetype=prd_detail 07 March 2016

[22] I. SinghS.V. KrishnamurthyH.V. MadhyasthaI. Neamtiu 2015 September ZapDroid: managing infrequently used applications on smartphones In Proceedings of the 2015 ACM International Joint Conference on Pervasive and Ubiquitous Computing 1185 1196 ACM

[23] Statista 2015 qNumber of available apps in the Apple App Store from July 2008 to June 2015 [online] Available at http://www.statista.com/statistics/263795/number-of-available-apps-in-the-apple-app-store/ 07 March 2016

[24] Statista 2015 Cumulative number of apps downloaded from the Apple App Store from July 2008 to June 2015 [online] Available at http://www.statista.com/statistics/263794/number-of-downloads-from-the-apple-app-store/ 07 March 2016

[25] J.O. WobbrockM.R. MorrisA.D. Wilson 2009 April User-defined gestures for surface computing In Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems 1083 1092 ACM

[26] Yahoo 2014 Android users have an average of 95 apps installed on their phones, according to Yahoo Aviate data [online] Available at http://thenextweb.com/apps/2014/08/26/android-users-average-95-apps-installed-phones-according-yahoo-aviate-data/ 07 March 2016