ICMI2013 – Mo!Games: evaluating mobile gestures in the wild

One of the apps was a mobile game where users had to toss marshmallows onto a target using gestures.

One of the apps was a mobile game where users had to toss marshmallows onto a target using gestures.

This year I attended ICMI 2013 in Sydney, Australia. I presented our full length paper entitled Mo!Games: evaluating mobile gestures in the wild. The paper describes an in the wild study of a mobile application that uses head, wrist, and device-based gestures. The goal of the study was to explore how users performed gesture-based interaction in their everyday lives and how they developed preferences for different gesture styles.

Abstract: The user experience of performing gesture-based interactions in public spaces is highly dependent on context, where users must decide which gestures they will use and how they will perform them. In order to complete a realistic evaluation of how users make these decisions, the evaluation of such user experiences must be completed “in the wild.” Furthermore, studies need to be completed within different cultural contexts in order to understand how users might adopt gesture differently in different cultures. This paper presents such a study using a mobile gesture-based game, where users in the UK and India interacted with this game over the span of 6 days. The results of this study demonstrate similarities between gesture use in these divergent cultural settings, illustrate factors that influence gesture acceptance such as perceived size of movement and perceived accuracy, and provide insights into the interaction design of mobile gestures when gestures are distributed across the body.

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