Laboratory of Informatics of Grenoble Équipe Ingénierie de l'Interaction Humain-Machine

Équipe Ingénierie de l'Interaction
Humain-Machine

Studying the Visual Representation of Microgestures

In ACM International Conference on Mobile Human-Computer Interaction (MobileHCI 2023). 2023.

Vincent Lambert, Adrien Chaffangeon Caillet, Alix Goguey, Sylvain Malacria, Laurence Nigay

Abstract

The representations of microgestures are essentials for researchers presenting their results through academic papers and system designers proposing tutorials to novice users. However, those representations remain disparate and inconsistent. As a first attempt to investigate how to best graphically represent microgestures, we created 21 designs, each depicting static and dynamic versions of 4 commonly used microgestures (tap, swipe, flex and hold). We first studied these designs in a quantitative online experiment with 45 participants. We then conducted a qualitative laboratory experiment in Augmented Reality with 16 participants. Based on the results, we provide design guidelines on which elements of a microgesture should be represented and how. In particular, it is recommended to represent the actuator and the trajectory of a microgesture. Also, although preferred by users, dynamic representations are not considered better than their static counterparts for depicting a microgesture and do not necessarily result in a better user recognition