Skip to Main Content
Designing Gestural Interfaces
book

Designing Gestural Interfaces

by Dan Saffer
November 2008
Intermediate to advanced content levelIntermediate to advanced
272 pages
9h 16m
English
O'Reilly Media, Inc.
Content preview from Designing Gestural Interfaces

TESTING PROTOTYPES

Once you have a prototype, the next likely thing to do with it is to test it with potential users. It is particularly important with gestural interfaces that you find representative potential users on whom to test the prototype, because a gesture that works fine with an office of technically savvy, educated, and healthy people may not work well when exposed to the harsh light of the public or a specific user group. Many research firms will help you find research subjects if needed.

Because the use of sensors and the data from them can change based on environment, if you are creating a free-form gestural interface, it makes sense to test your product in the actual environment (or in a set of potential environments) to make sure that the sensors and any other hardware, such as projectors, are calibrated and set up correctly and that the data coming in from the sensors is triggering the system correctly.

You'll want to put together a test plan—a written path through your product to test—and a moderator script—what to say when guiding people through the plan—that make sure your gestures are discoverable ("What would you do if you wanted to do X?"), meaningful ("Would you ever do that?"), useful ("Are you able to do what you wanted to do?"), and usable ("Can you do that action?").

Several test subjects(typically less than 10) will usually quickly reveal the flaws of your product. If possible, you should leave yourself time between testing sessions to recalibrate sensors ...

Become an O’Reilly member and get unlimited access to this title plus top books and audiobooks from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers, thousands of courses curated by job role, 150+ live events each month,
and much more.
Start your free trial

You might also like

Designing Web Interfaces

Designing Web Interfaces

Bill Scott, Theresa Neil
Designing Mobile Interfaces

Designing Mobile Interfaces

Steven Hoober, Eric Berkman
Designing Social Interfaces, 2nd Edition

Designing Social Interfaces, 2nd Edition

Christian Crumlish, Erin Malone
Interaction design for tangible interfaces

Interaction design for tangible interfaces

Stephen P. Anderson, Jonathan Follett

Publisher Resources

ISBN: 9780596156756Errata