A Flick in the Right Direction An Evaluation of Simple Gesture Based Controls

Flick gesture systems provide an efficient alternative to common interface controls. This paper investigates the properties of natural flick gestures. These properties include gesture magnitude, gesture duration and angular error. Flick gestures are then applied to the frequent user task of web navigation. The web gesture system is then evaluated to determine the efficiency and learnability of the flick gesture in a real world application. Results showed that subjects were able to navigate significantly faster using the gesture system compared to the standard web browser. Subjects were also extremely enthusiastic about the technique, with many expressing their wish that “all browsers should support this”. Subjects also found the gesture system easy to learn.