Comparing Direct Off-Screen Pointing, Peephole, and Flick&Pinch Interaction for Map Navigation

Abstract

Navigating large workspaces with mobile devices often require users to access information that spatially lies beyond its‟ viewport. To browse information on such workspaces, two prominent spatially-aware navigation techniques, peephole, and direct off-screen pointing, have been proposed as alternatives to the standard on-screen flick and pinch gestures. Previous studies have shown that both techniques can outperform on-screen gestures in various user tasks, but no prior study has compared the three techniques in a map-based analytic task. In this paper, we examine these two spatially-aware techniques and compare their efficiency to on-screen gestures in a map navigation and exploration scenario. Our study demonstrates that peephole and direct off-screen pointing allows for 30% faster navigation times between workspace locations and that on-screen flick and pinch is superior for accurate retrieval of workspace content.

Video

Citation

Khalad Hasan, David Ahlström, and Pourang Irani. 2015. Comparing Direct Off-Screen Pointing, Peephole, and Flick&Pinch Interaction for Map Navigation. In Proceedings of the ACM Symposium on Spatial User Interaction (SUI 2015). Los Angeles, USA. ACM. 99-102.