Supporting Transitions to Expertise in Hidden Toolbars

Abstract

In presenting this thesis in partial fulfilment of the requirements for a Postgraduate degree from the University of Saskatchewan, I agree that the Libraries of this University may make it freely available for inspection. I further agree that permission for copying of this thesis in any manner, in whole or in part, for scholarly purposes may be granted by the professor or professors who supervised my thesis work or, in their absence, by the Head of the Department or the Dean of the College in which my thesis work was done. It is understood that any copying or publication or use of this thesis or parts thereof for financial gain shall not be allowed without my written permission. It is also understood that due recognition shall be given to me and to the University of Saskatchewan in any scholarly use which may be made of any material in my thesis.

MarkPad

“…Shorter times were obtained for smaller menus (e.g. about 1300 ms for 2 × 8 Marking menus [27] and 1517 ms for the Swipe technique in [42]), but these results are not comparable as we used a dense configuration with small areas close to each other. Times would probably be shorter for simpler configurations with large areas.…”

“…Computer systems often provide "hot" corners or hidden toolbars that either trigger commands or display menus when the mouse cursor reaches the corners or the borders of the screen (e.g., the Mac Dock or the Windows Charm Bar). Schramm et al [42] proposed four techniques for improving hidden toolbars. Using several devices, they found a trade-off between completion time and error detection while using vision-free interfaces.…”

“…MarkPad provides three interaction modes (fullnovice, expert and semi-novice) depending on user expertise. In full-novice mode, the user first holds the Function key (she could also double tap the border, touch it in a special area or use one of the methods described in [42]). The names of the available menus are then displayed on the borders of the screen.…”

“…In this case he can double touch the desired menu area, or touch it for at least 500ms, to make this menu appear. This design relies on rehearsal [27,42]. It allows fluid transition from novice to expert use as the same gestures are performed in all cases.…”

Awareness, Usage and Discovery of Swipe-revealed Hidden Widgets in iOS

“…Indeed, academic research has mostly investigated the performance of novel edge-based interaction techniques, such as menus or keyboards [11,25,27] that do not rely on a physical metaphor that may help the users to uncover these features. Similarly, Schramm et al [26] investigated the transition to expertise in Hidden toolbars, a name describing various types of UIs making functionality available only when users explicitly expose them through a dedicated interaction, such as menubars (revealing commands when the menubar is clicked), Windows 8's "charms" [10] or certain swhidgets (typically System swhidgets). Their work was focused on the performance of such interfaces, proposing four hidden toolbar designs (all different from actual swhidgets designs) and comparing their performance in terms of selection time and item location learning.…”