What Gestures Do People Actually Use?

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I thought this was interesting. Luke W. writes up some notes on a talk given last week in Chicago at the Design for Mobile conference by Dan Mauney, Director of Human Factors and Research at design consultancy HumanCentric. The subject was a study Mauney and his team did on what gestures forty people in nine different countries intuitively and comfortably use when interfacing with mobile devices. One point was particularly interesting to me:

“The study didn’t find see a lot of variability between experts and novices — move and zoom had the biggest variability.”

If true, that’s a world of difference from the paradigm of desktop computing. Hopefully Mauney will make his presentation available in full, but in the meantime you can read Luke’s notes here.

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  1. Nick

    Hey Khoi,

    I was at D4M, and Dan did post the data from his presentation on their blog a day or so after his talk. You can find the link here.

    It was a very interesting presentation. On the point you mentioned, one of the gestures to see the largest divide between experts and novices was scrolling. Experts swiped down to scroll down – like a Palm Pilot user using a stylus on a scrollbar; whereas novices swiped down to scroll up, like on an iPhone.

    Lots of other good data on his blog.

  2. giuliano

    I think that is quite normal. In desktop computing a casual user will use the tool more universally known and intuitive to use. A “power” user will take the time to study shortcuts, techniques and the likes.

    But we are all “power” user when it came to our hands, fingers and the ability to move them : )

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