Reading Assignment: "Those Look Similar!" Issues in Automating Gesture Design Advice

Reference Information
Title: "Those Look Similar!" Issues in Automating Gesture Design Advice
Authors: A. Chris Long, Jr., James A. Landay, Lawrence A. Rowe
Citation: "'Those Look Similar!' Issues in Automating Gesture Design Advice", A. Chris Long, Jr., James A. Landay, Lawrence A. Rowe, Proceedings of the 2001 workshop on Perceptive User Interfaces, pp. 1-5, 2001.

Summary
This paper discussed quill, a gesture design tool to help interface designers with the creation of pen-based gestures. It provides the user with unsolicited advice by actively offering users design advice as they create gestures. The advice consists of warnings that appear while the user is creating gestures. It warns if gesture classes are too similar and if a gesture can be easily misrecognized. The idea is to provide a tool that helps novice interface designers to create improved gestures that can be easily recognized by both computers and people.

Various experiments were conducted. The first set of experiments consisted of participants judging similarity between gestures. It allowed a model to be created to recognize gestures that people can easily confuse with other gestures due to similarities. It was determined that the similarity predictions could be wrong, however.

A set of issues regarding the advice was presented, as well. It regarded interface challenges, such as the timing of presenting warnings to users, the amount of advice presented to users, and the content of such advice. Background processes and hierarchical structures were also discussed. It was hoped that the advice presented regarding these issues could be used in the future to improve other gesture techniques.

Thoughts
I think that it's a great idea to create a tool for those unfamiliar with gestures to easily create and improve upon them. I liked that preliminary experiments regarding gesture design were conducted in order to determine a foundation on which to base the tool that was created. In addition, the advice that was presented from the research and experiments that were conducted seems like it could be very helpful to apply to further studies of this nature. However, the paper seemed to be lacking in implementation details about the tool. Also, it was mentioned that a formal evaluation of quill occurred and that some conclusions were made based on it; however, the evaluation itself was never discussed. In addition, some of the conclusions drawn about presenting advice did not seem to explain the reasoning that backed up the conclusion. It would have been helpful to provide a description of how this conclusion was reached, or to have conducted further experiments to test the validity of the conclusion.