Agile Search: A tool for searching apps easily on mobile by gesture

Abstract

Enabling fast access to apps is important to smartphone users especially when there are a large number of apps installed on their devices. Several gesture based search approaches have been proposed to increase the search efficiency and accuracy with improved convenience, but their gesture-app mapping mechanism still largely relies on the textual information of apps. This means such methods can become less effective when a user is trying to locate rarely used apps as they may not be able to recall any textual cues about the app. Since apps are appeared as icons with text descriptions on a device's screen, there may have other cues that can be used to inform gestures for shortcut access to apps to overcome current text based search/mapping limitations. An initial study involving 24 participants to understand the impact of app icon designs on creating gestures as app shortcuts has been conducted. The results show that users not only tend to use visual cues presented in app icons to create gestures, but also create them based on apps' usage frequency and different icon types.Mobile touch gestures. Search app. Gesture search. BACKGROUNDAfter the emergence of touch screen device and rapid development of touch sensor technology, using touch gesture to interact with mobile device is becoming a dominant trend. Touch gesture is easy to use; can reducing user's recognize load and extend the input vocabulary; appears in an intuitive way. It is easier to be accepted by users due to, quieter than voice interaction, easier to perform than mid-air gesture, and would not cause spectator's attention. These advantages of using touch gesture to interact have made it more and more popular.Touch gesture is capable to fulfil many kinds of tasks, and has greatly improved user experience by making users' interaction more lively and interesting. In order to won users' heart, regardless of system functions that integrated in mobile systems (e.g., volume control) and those customized functions within the app all allowing interact action with a gesture. Evidence can be found that Apple and Android, the two giants in the mobile phone market, both enable system touch gesture for interaction in their mobile phone system to meet their users' need. Moreover, under the highly competitive of the app market, many app developers also provide touch gesture support in their app to improve their competitiveness.Many apps use gesture to serve their user in conduct different tasks, for example game apps use touch gesture to move an object (e.g., the Angry Bird), browser apps enable touch gesture to complete tasks such as switch between different tabs and go "back to" recently visited webpages, tool apps use touch gestures to achieve certain goal, such as the screen-locking apps allow users to use specified gesture as their secret password to lock their mobile screen and so on.Today, the number of these powerful apps that serve users in an elegant way has begun to shoot up, and this trend has no sign of change. Evidence can be found in the report of enorm...