DoThisHere: Using multi-modal interaction to support cross-application tasks on mobile devices

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Many computing tasks, such as comparison shopping, twofactor authentication, and checking movie reviews, require using multiple apps together. On large screens, “windows, icons, menus, pointer” (WIMP) graphical user interfaces (GUIs) support easy sharing of content and context between multiple apps. So, it is easy to see the content from one application and write something relevant in another application, such as looking at the map around a place and typing walking instructions into an email. However, although today’s smartphones also use GUIs, they have small screens and limited windowing support, making it hard to switch contexts and exchange data between apps. We introduce DoThisHere, a multimodal interaction technique that streamlines cross-app tasks and reduces the burden thesetasks impose on users. Users can use voice to refer to information or app features that are off-screen and touch to specify where the relevant information should be inserted or is displayed. With DoThisHere, users can access information from or carry information to other apps with less context switching. We conducted a survey to find out what cross-app tasks people are performing or wish to perform on their smartphones. Among the 125 tasks that we collected from 75 participants, we found that 59 of these tasks are not well supported currently. DoThisHere is helpful in completing 95% of these unsupported tasks. A user study, where users are shown the list of supported voice commands when performing a representative sample of such tasks, suggests that DoThisHere may reduce expert users’ cognitive load; the Query action, in particular, can help users reduce task completion time.