[IxDA Discuss] Anticipatory Gestures

[Leisa Reichelt]

>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 do this all the time too. For me it's a digital version of an
annoying thing that I do when reading a book, which is to flick
through the top corner of the pages with my thumb repeatedly. Drives
people mad, but it's too much of a habit for me to stop.

So, when I'm reading text on a screen, I'm constantly selecting it and
deselecting it for no reason... just an annoying habit.

I think it's reasonably rare tho'. I've not observed much of this
either in testing or 'in the wild', and people frequently remark on
observing me behaving this way that it's strange and unusual.

NY Times apparently does lots of testing. I wonder if they tested this
new feature and if they saw anything interesting :)


On 15/03/07, Christopher Fahey <chris.fahey at behaviordesign.com> wrote:
> > 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
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-- 
________________________
Leisa Reichelt
Contextual Research & User Centred Design

leisa.reichelt at gmail.com
www.disambiguity.com