[IxDA Discuss] Anticipatory Gestures

[Christopher Fahey]

> one of our users had 
> anticipated a control being in one part of the screen, so he 
> moved the pointer there prior to the screen fully loading.

Awesome observation. Additionally, it's been noted that many users move
their cursors around a screen seemingly randomly, selecting text for no
conscious reason, clicking in non-hot places, rolling over everything on
the page... All seemingly just to kill time or to have something to do
with one's hand. 

The NY Times recently implemented a feature that when you double click a
word in any article, a pop-up window will appear with additional
resources about that particular word. For someone like me who does click
around the screen in "safe" places as a kind of nervous habit, this is
an unwanted functionality. The designers didn't figure on users
displaying this kind of "benign interaction" behavior. 

I think "anticipatory gestures" is just one subset of this broad
category of "benign interactions", interactions whose purposes range
from purely nervous movement (like tapping one's foot on the floor or
fingers on the table), to anticipating where they 'feel' the feature
they want should be, all the way to subconsciously rolling over stuff to
see if anything pops up. Because they have no conscious purposes and no
meaningful effect on underlying process flows, I call them "benign
interactions" (although I like "Brownian Motion"). 

Anyone else observe this phenomenon?

-Cf

Christopher Fahey
____________________________
Behavior
http://www.behaviordesign.com
me: http://www.graphpaper.com