Section: New Results

Macro-dynamics

Participants : Stéphane Huot, Sylvain Malacria [contact person] , Nicole Pong.

Awareness, usage and discovery of hidden controls

Revealing a hidden widget with a dedicated sliding gesture is a common interaction design in today's handheld devices. Such “Swhidgets” (for swipe-revealed hidden widgets) provide a fast (and sometime unique) access to some commands. Interestingly, swhidgets do not follow conventional design guidelines in that they have no explicit signifiers, and users have to discover their existence before being able to use them. We conducted the first two studies specifically targeted to this type of interface design, investigating iOS users' experience with swhidgets. The first study conducted in a laboratory setting investigated which Swhidgets are spontaneously used by participants when prompted to perform certain operations on an iOS device. The second study conducted via an online survey platform, investigated which Swhidgets users reported to know and use. Combined, our studies provide the following main insights on awareness, usage and discovery of Swhidgets by middle-aged and technology-friendly users. Our results suggest that Swhidgets are moderately but unevenly known by participants, yet the awareness and the discovery issues of this design is worthy of further discussion [21].