Agile Search: A tool for searching apps easily on mobile by gesture
Chi Zhang · Electronic workshops in computing · 2016
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.