Semi-customizable Gestural Commands Approach and Its Evaluation

Pen-based interfaces allow users to interact with the help of a stylus and/or fingers. Thanks to a recognition system, users can execute commands by drawing gestures. Because of the complexity of the software, the set of gesture commands can be very large. Consequently, it becomes difficult for the users to remember all the commands. In this paper we introduce "Semi-customizable gestural commands". The idea is to take into account the commands usage frequency: to facilitate the memorization of the most used commands we leave users the freedom/liberty to define their associated gestures (by) themselves. The remaining gesture commands will be automatically generated on the base of the defined gestures according to their hierarchical categorization. Several comparative tests demonstrate that this new approach improved the progressive memorization of the gestural commands.