Investigating the Effects of Legacy Bias

Abstract

User elicitation studies are commonly used for designing gestures by putting the users in the designers' seat. One of the most encountered phenomenon during these studies is legacy bias. It refers to users' tendency to transfer gestures from the existing technologies to their designs. The literature presents varying views on the topic; some studies asserted that legacy bias should be diminished, whereas other stated that it should be preserved. Yet, to the best of our knowledge, none of the elicitation studies tested their designs with the end users. In our study, 36 participants compared two gesture sets with and without legacy. Initial findings showed that legacy gesture set had higher scores. However, the interviews uncovered that some non-legacy gestures were also favored due to their practicality and affordances. We contribute to the legacy bias literature by providing new insights from the end users' perspective.