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

Nicole Ke Cheng Pong (1) , Sylvain Malacria (1)

1 LOKI - Technology and knowledge for interaction

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. In this paper, we discuss the benefits of this signifierless design and investigate how iOS users deal with this type of widgets. We report on the results of a laboratory study and an online survey, investigating iOS users' experience with swhidgets. 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.

Mots clés: swhidgets; hidden controls; gestural interaction; iOS

Domaines: Interface homme-machine [cs.HC]

Nicole Ke Cheng Pong, Sylvain Malacria. Awareness, Usage and Discovery of Swipe-revealed Hidden Widgets in iOS. ISS 2019 - Proceedings of the ACM Conference on Interactive Surfaces and Spaces, Nov 2019, Daejeon, South Korea. ⟨hal-02293836⟩