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Section: New Results

Multi-touch Gestures for Data Graphics

Participants : Wesley Willett, Qi Lan, Petra Isenberg.

Figure 11. The most common gestures used for selecting (a) downward trends, (b) peaks, (c) ordinal ranges, (d) non-contiguous items, (e) highest points, (f) repeating dates, and (g) the lowest three points in a time series chart.
IMG/multitouchselection.png

Selecting data items is a common and extremely important form of interaction with data graphics, and serves as the basis for many other data interaction techniques. However, interactive charting tools for multi-touch displays typically only provide dedicated multi-touch gestures for single-point selection or zooming. We conducted a study in which we used gesture elicitation to explore a wider range of possible selection interactions for multi-touch data graphics [35] . The results show a strong preference for simple, one-handed selection gestures. They also show that users tend to interact with chart axes and make figurative selection gestures outside the chart, rather than interact with the visual marks themselves. Finally, we found strong consensus around several unique selection gestures related to visual chart features.