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

Abstract

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.

Contributors

Chi Zhang

Conference

Publication date: July 2016

Publication date (Print): July 2016

Pages: 1-6

Affiliations

Bournemouth University

P521 Pool House Bournemouth

University BH1 25BB

Article

DOI: 10.14236/ewic/HCI2016.12

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

License:

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/

Categories

Series title: Electronic Workshops in Computing