Exploring Emotional Impact on User Experience with Mobile Touchscreen Gestures through User Evaluation
Sofia Vierula · Lauda (University of Lapland) · 2026
The touchscreen gestures swipe, drag and tap are used among mobile applications providing efficient and engaging usage, ensuring everyday interaction. Their effectiveness is discovered by previous research, however it has not been widely explored whether a gesture itself possesses a certain emotional impact to the user. The aim of this study is to discover the emotional qualities of these commonly used gestures by comparing them with each other using user evaluation. These factors were tested with 12 simplified interactive mobile UI prototypes with 18 participants using SAM-scale, likert scale and structured interview as data collection methods. The data was analysed using repeated measures Anova and thematic analysis. The study results showed that these gestures possess little emotional impact by themselves and participants preferred gestures which provide efficient usability. Swipe and tap are perceived as fast and natural, whereas the slowness of drag was seen as the least engaging. Swipe enhances engagement with fast decisive interfaces, tap with precision requiring tasks, and drag as an element of friction. The findings suggest that different gestures do change the UX and can assist in emotional impact if users connect the UI to different subjective contexts from their past experiences. With a visual example design, I propose that this emotional UX can be obtained by designing embodied metaphors, which combine gestural features with real-world affordances activating reflective level user engagement. These suggestions can be applied to mobile UI designs when selecting gestures to enhance the UX.