Studying the Simultaneous Visual Representation of Microgestures

Hand microgestures are promising for mobile interaction with wearable devices. However, they will not be adopted if practitioners cannot communicate to users the microgestures associated with the commands of their applications. This requires unambiguous representations that simultaneously shows the multiple microgestures available to control an application. Using a systematic approach, we evaluate how these representations should be designed and contrast 4 conditions depending on the microgestures (tap-swipe and tap-hold) and fingers considered (index and index-middle). Based on the results, we design a simultaneous representation of microgestures for a given set of 14 application commands. We then evaluate the usability of the representation for novice users and the suitability of the representation for small screens compared with a baseline. Finally, we formulate 8 recommendations based on the results of all the experiments. In particular, redundant graphical and textual representations of microgestures should only be displayed for novice users.