This paper was presented at UIST 2010.
Yang Li is a Senior Google Researcher with a PhD in Computer Science from the Chinese Academy of Sciences.
Summary
Hypothesis
The main hypothesis discussed in this paper was that this Gesture Search platform would provide an easy way for users to look-up contacts, applications, etc by using simple gestures. The Gesture Search application was built where users could directly draw a gesture to the screen and the gesture engine would attempt to locate relevant items from the user's phone.
Methods
In order to be flexible and efficient, the researcher implemented several helpful modules to aid in searching.
The first was to recognize multiple possible meanings of a gesture rather than selecting just one. For example, if the user writes something that could either be an "H" or an "A" both alternatives are considered.
Second, the system would recognize frequently searched-for terms and would appear higher up in the search results.
They also added a system to figure out whether a gesture was an actual gesture or simple a UI Event system.
In order to test out there complete system, they sent it to various Android users in the office and asked them to use the application. As a user would use the app, the app would log and report information back to a homebase where the usage data would be analyzed. At the end of the test, users were asked to complete a survey on the app usage.
Results
The core group they focused on was the group of people who used the app at least once a month and have used at more than once a week.
They found that users primarily used the app to find contacts in their phone device.
They also found that short gestures indeed helped find an item in their phone faster. In fact, 61% of 5,497 queries found the correct item. Many queries were extremely short even with large datasets.
With the survey, user support was generally solid. Again, most users reported using the app for contact search for the most part. Not many used it for searching and opening applications
Discussion
This kind of gesture system seems like it would be naturally at home on touch screen devices. It's surprising how long a system like this has taken to develop onto modern devices.
Palm Pilot's from the late 90s and early 2000s had gesture search abilities (through their "graffiti" system).
Perhaps the reason why this kind of gesture search has become so strange is our continued love affair with the QWERTY keyboard. We've begun to almost completely associate input on technology devices with a QWERTY keyboards. I believe that's why gesture search is sometimes hard to pick up and not so commonly used.
I feel as if the researchers did a good job getting their point across, though. It seemed that when users got used to using this application, it let them quickly find what they were looking for.
A possible future development for this kind of application would be to include it natively in the OS as opposed to just creating an application that must be used.
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