Understanding Shortcut Gestures on Mobile Touch Devices

Touch gestures become steadily more important with the on-going success of touch screen devices. Compared to tradi-tional user interfaces, gestures have the potential to lower cognitive load and the need for visual attention. However, nowadays gestures are defined by designers and developers and it is questionable if these meet all user requirements. In this paper, we present two exploratory studies that investi-gate how users would use unistroke touch gestures for short-cut access to a mobile phone’s key functionalities. We study the functions that users want to access, the preferred activa-tors for gesture execution, and the shapes of the user-invented gestures. We found that most gestures trigger applications, letter-shaped gestures are preferred, and the gestures should be accessible from the lock screen, the wallpaper, and the no-tification bar. We conclude with a coherent, unambiguous set of gestures for the 20 most frequently accessed functions, which can inform the design of future gesture-controlled ap-plications. Author Keywords Touch gestures; shortcut; mobile phone; gesture recognition