Attribute Gates Ahmed Sulaiman & Patrick Olivier Culture Lab, Newcastle University, UK

ACM UIST Symposium, Monterey, CA, 2008 The result…

ACM UIST Symposium, Monterey, CA, 2008 Tabletop education

ACM UIST Symposium, Monterey, CA, 2008 Motivation: tabletops tabletop “spaces”: – personal, public & storage each space has requirements: –scale, orientation & access rights users often override defaults. need lightweight techniques to change these attributes need to take account of the size and shared nature of tabletops.

ACM UIST Symposium, Monterey, CA, 2008 Principle: activity theory framework for thinking about physical & co- located collaborative interaction –activity, action & operation novice to expert: –carrying out more actions as operations good interfaces move actions into operations related to Buxton’s notion of “chunking” –amount of problem performed automatically –glue subtasks together into larger task

ACM UIST Symposium, Monterey, CA, 2008 Principle: crossing pen input: –encourages a fluid stroke-based style –suited to crossing-based interfaces rather than point-and-click. crossing-based interface: –attribute usually represented by a thin rectangular area set by crossing –position attributes to allow a user to set multiple in one fluid stroke. CrossY (UIST 2004) FlowMenu (UIST 2000)

ACM UIST Symposium, Monterey, CA, 2008 Principle: targeting & steering Accot and Zhai extended Fitts’ law for steering: D : distance W : width of channel D/W : index of difficulty a & b : user dependent constants seek to optimise the design of attribute gates for targeting and steering effort

ACM UIST Symposium, Monterey, CA, 2008 Grid gates

ACM UIST Symposium, Monterey, CA, 2008 Polar gates

ACM UIST Symposium, Monterey, CA, 2008 Configuration: grid gates when steering dominates: when targeting dominates: w/h ratio in the range of

ACM UIST Symposium, Monterey, CA, 2008 Configuration: polar gates steering: keep r 0 small w as big as possible utilize all parts of the upper limb (Acot & Zhai, 2001)

ACM UIST Symposium, Monterey, CA, 2008 Evaluation: design 8 pairs of users: –receiver –sender 3 conditions –context menu –grid gates –polar gates measures: –awareness –performance –preference

ACM UIST Symposium, Monterey, CA, 2008 Results: awareness

ACM UIST Symposium, Monterey, CA, 2008 Results: performance (participant)

ACM UIST Symposium, Monterey, CA, 2008 Results: performance (attribute)

ACM UIST Symposium, Monterey, CA, 2008 Reflections an appropriate technique for setting multiple attributes when moving between spaces grounded in established principles of interaction design applied to the tabletop setting user preferences were varied –significant number preferred contextual menus other aspects of polar gates: –top projection partially obscures attributes –gate memory (is it of genuine worth?) –physical metaphor helped steering behaviour –users found polar gates much easier to learn

ACM UIST Symposium, Monterey, CA, 2008 Using attribute gates…

ACM UIST Symposium, Monterey, CA, 2008 Acknowledgements Promethean Technology Limited –donating the multi-pen ActivBoards Diwan Software (Dubai) –funding and employing Ahmed Bedlington Community High School –organising studies (motivating work) –extended use of experimental applications Reviewers for their detailed feedback

ACM UIST Symposium, Monterey, CA, 2008 Thanks for listening…