September 2008 Usability Spotlight

Mapping Gestures to User Interactions

by Wendy Yee, Director, User Centric

A growing number of gesture interactions are being built into consumer products. Tablet PCs now recognize a number of hand movements, new multi-touch phones and media players are on the market, and thousands of households now attach Wii remotes to their forearms every evening. (If you happen to visit Vegas, you can also visit the Rio iBar owned by Harrah's and order custom drinks or play virtual bowling on the Surface table.)

Gesture interactions are not new - visual designers have used gestures and their styluses to tweak graphics files on Wacom tablets since the 1990's. However, the use of gestures in mainstream applications is novel for many consumers.

Over the past couple of years we have studied users interacting with different gesture-based interactions, and we'd like to share some of the issues that they have experienced.

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Usability Tip

by Wendy Yee and Leslie McFarlin

Emphasize Task Context When Testing Devices that Recognize Gestures

When a user's primary (or secondary) means of interacting with a device or application is through gesture recognition, there are often a couple of gesture-related issues that need to be assessed in usability testing. The first issue is the user's awareness of gesture functionality. Do they realize that they can drag and drop objects? Do they realize that "flicking" the touchscreen will result in a different outcome than "nudging"? The second issue is the user's ease of gesturing to complete an action under "typical" conditions (sitting, standing, etc).

The Not Usable File

Is success good or bad?

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Headlines

Robert Schumacher Invited to Speak in Moscow in Early October 2008

Gavin Lew, Leslie McFarlin and Thomas Green presented at HFES 2008

Korey Johnson presented at HFES 2008

User Centric Subsidiary in China

Announcements

User Centric is growing! This quarter we welcome User Experience Specialist Michael Niebling.

We also would like to congratulate Martin Ho on his promotion to Senior User Experience Specialist and Jared Jeffers on his promotion to User Experience Specialist.

Something to Wine About

by Bob Schumacher, Managing Director, User Centric

While I think there is some loose correlation between price and quality of wine, it is not always the case. We can't all drink $50 / bottle wine as every day wine. But many, myself included, like to have a glass or two daily for medicinal purposes. Thus there's always a hunt for a good sub $10 wine that doesn't taste like motor oil. And remember "good" wine is just wine that you enjoy. Well, my wife was perusing the local Trader Joe's and stumbled on the upscale version of "Two Buck Chuck" - their fabled $2 a bottle Charles Shaw wine. The upscale version called "Trader Joe's Reserve" is available in a 2005 California Cabernet (as well as a Zinfandel). These wines sell for only $10 / bottle and are quite pleasing to the palate, and in my book can easily compete with $20 - $30 wines of similar vintage. They are surprisingly good and certainly worth a hunt! Enjoy.