Pen-based user interfaces are becoming ever more popular. Gestures (i.e.,
marks made with a pen to invoke a command) are a valuable
aspect of pen-based UIs, but they also have drawbacks. The challenge in
designing good gestures is to make them easy for people to learn
and remember. With the goal of better gesture design, we performed a pair
of experiments to determine why users find gestures similar.
From these experiments, we have derived a computational model for
predicting perceived gesture similarity that correlates 0.56 with
observation. We will incorporate the results of these experiments into a
gesture design tool, which will aid the pen-based UI designer in
creating gesture sets that are easier to learn and more memorable.