[IxDA Discuss] Anticipatory Gestures

[Alok Jain]

In one of the user testing I had done for a large document management system
with some advanced users.

We found that users navigated through multiple pages of search results and
would scan through the results list, hit page down and actually expected the
page length and hence the distance to the "Next" link be the same. Distance
here being the number of time they hit page down key. It was frustrating for
them if the distance changed and they had to reorient mouse position. We
found this with 2 out of 8 users, all were advanced and frequent users of
the application.

We could not find a way to technically manage this distance, but were able
to handle this with increased spacing, which was received well by other 6 as
well.

-- 
Best Regards
Alok Jain
----------------------------------------------------------
http://www.iPrincipia.com
http://www.i-Kreate.org




On 3/15/07, Dan Brown <brownorama at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Something interesting happened in usability testing yesterday. Without
> belaboring the details of the interface (which I was not responsible
> for), 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.
>
> He had good reason to. This particular site was divided into four
> sections. Three of the four sections located the control in the lower
> right corner. The fourth in the lower left.
>
> Our participant noticed this immediately and pointed it out. The quote
> that'll go in my report is something like this: "See, I put my mouse
> here because that's where the others were."
>
> I'm curious about research in this area. Has anyone looked at the
> impact of anticipatory gestures -- both positively when the interface
> is consistent enough to support it and negatively when it's not?
>
> If it doesn't already have an official name, I would propose that we
> call these gestures "Brownian motions" -- but I believe that's already
> been taken [1]... :-)
>
> -- Dan
>
> [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brownian_motion
>
> --
> } work: eightshapes.com
> } book: communicatingdesign.com
> } blog: greenonions.com
> } talk: +1 (301) 801-4850
>