Using strokes as command shortcuts: cognitive benefits and toolkit support

This paper investigates using stroke gestures as shortcuts to menu selection. We first experimentally measured the per-formance and ease of learning of stroke shortcuts in com-parison to keyboard shortcuts when there is no mnemonic link between the shortcut and the command. While both types of shortcuts had the same level of performance with enough practice, stroke shortcuts had substantial cognitive advantages in learning and recall. With the same amount of practice, users could successfully recall more shortcuts and make fewer errors with stroke shortcuts than with keyboard shortcuts. The second half of the paper focuses on UI de-velopment support and articulates guidelines for toolkits to implement stroke shortcuts in a wide range of software ap-plications. We illustrate how to apply these guidelines by introducing the Stroke Shortcuts Toolkit (SST) which is a li-brary for adding stroke shortcuts to Java Swing applications with just a few lines of code