Memorability of pre-designed and user-defined gesture sets

Abstract

We studied the memorability of free-form gesture sets for invoking actions. We compared three types of gesture sets: user-defined gesture sets, gesture sets designed by the authors, and random gesture sets in three studies with 33 participants in total. We found that user-defined gestures are easier to remember, both immediately after creation and on the next day (up to a 24% difference in recall rate compared to pre-designed gestures). We also discovered that the differences between gesture sets are mostly due to association errors (rather than gesture form errors), that participants prefer user-defined sets, and that they think user-defined gestures take less time to learn. Finally, we contribute a qualitative analysis of the tradeoffs involved in gesture type selection and share our data and a video corpus of 66 gestures for replicability and further analysis.