Socialacceptability

Usable Gestures for Mobile Interfaces: Evaluating Social Acceptability [1]

Synopsis

This paper looks into how acceptable people are to use certain sets of gestures in differing public locations as well as audience with their mobile devices.

Strengths

1. Individuals are constantly aware of their surroundings and how other people within those surroundings are perceiving them, tailoring gesture commands to be socially acceptable can have a drastic impact on how willing people are to use those gestures
2. Motivation to use the gesture based technology must outweigh the risk of making a social blunder
3. Social acceptability of a gesture is a combination of many factors ranging from appearance, social status, to culture
4. Examined both device and body based gestures
5. Results show that location is a huge factor with how willing people are to use gestures with 12% more willing to use gestures at work and 34% at home when compared to using gestures on the pavement

Weaknesses

1. Gestures are often limited in order to demonstrate technological limitations.
2. Social factors are identified as reasons for users willingness to use certain gestures but does not provide what these social factors are or how the influence opinion
3. Overall a very small test group with much bias toward male's since the test group was 71% male
4. The acceptance rate while driving is very small, but this might be due to laws that restrict usage of mobile devices while driving. This does not necessarily correspond to a social acceptance

Bibliography

1. Julie Rico and Stephen Brewster, Usable Gestures for Mobile Interfaces: Evaluating Social Acceptability.