Blog #8

Gesture search: a tool for fast mobile data access

Author
Yang Li - Google Research, Mountain View, CA, USA

He has published 25 documents and been cited 195 times

Proceeding 
UIST '10 Proceedings of the 23nd annual ACM symposium on User interface software and technology

Summary:

Standard GUI input on mobile devices is rigid and sometimes difficult. Often a user may need to traverse several pages to get to an item. Gesture search is a gesture based search application for Android devices that allows for a considerable amount of ambiguity. It is a part of Google Labs and should be considered a concept.

Hypotheses

Yank Li hypothesized that Gesture Search provides a quick and less stressful way for users to access mobile data.

Methods

Gesture Search has two components: Latin character gesture recognition and a search algorithm. The algorithm is not explained in detail. The Article primarily describes how ambiguous gesture input can be translated into useful results for the user. To perform a search, a letter is drawn using the whole screen. Since some letters can look similar, both possible cases are considered in the search. After each letter is read, the list of results updates. The results can be any item of data on the phone, including contacts, music, and applications. Hidden Markov Models were used to determine the next possible results during the search. Data is collected from users opting into longitudinal data collection.

Results

For The data collected indicates that 84% of the search results were found within one gesture, and 98% in two gestures. Also, since the application resides in the Android Market, people found it agreeable with 4.5 stars out of 5.

Discussion

I tried out this app and was generally satisfied with it. The first task I tried to do was to search songs, but it didn't seem to search for it or the input was too erratic. However searching for contacts was much more successful. I still prefer SenseUI's input scheme for finding contacts, which involved entering numbers and the interface guessing who to bring up based on an algorithm similar to T9. In its current state, I don't see it as useful since i can search in the file manager Astro or the command line interface ConnectBot just as fast, since all 3 apps require a shortcut to open.

*edit, I found why music wasn't being searched, it wasn't selected for indexing by default.