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Abstract
One-handed interactions on smartphone interfaces offer a prominent feature of highly mobile inputs. Thus, the design factor of user reachability is essential to realizing the incentive. However, the sole consideration of physical characteristics, such as hand size and thumb length, does not fully reflect the users’ perceived choices of hand poses and the corresponding inertia. We first conducted a 6-week questionnaire-based study of UI rating tasks and collected 62,156 responses reflecting user preferences for 3000 clustered UIs. Our analysis of the responses shows that user perceptions of smartphone UI components are divergent from their physical ability of thumb reaches; e.g. they can reach an icon with a thumb reach, but they prefer alternative hand poses. Accordingly, we propose a machine learning model, i.e. XGBoost (XGB), to predict the user’s choices of hand poses, with a reasonable prediction accuracy of 64% that can be regarded as a practical preliminary evaluation tool. With illustrative examples, our model can offer auxiliary information in the assessment of perceived user reachability with one-handed interaction on smartphone interfaces, which paves a path toward a computational understanding of UI designs, and such findings can be further extended to 2D UIs in 3D worlds.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
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Additional information
Notes on contributors
Lik-Hang Lee
Lik-Hang Lee is an assistant professor at the Hong Kong Polytechnic University. Prior to his current position, he was an assistant professor (tenure-track) with the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST), South Korea. His primary research interests are Augmented Reality (AR), Virtual Reality (VR), and Education Technologies.
Yui-Pan Yau
Yui-Pan Yau completed his degree at the University of Science and Technology. His research interests are in designing thumb-driven user interfaces and human-drone interaction. His works appear at several well-recognized venues, including IEEE PERCOM, ACM IMWUT, IEEE TiTS, ACM WebConf, IEEE/RSJ IROS, and Proceedings of the ACM on HCI.
Pan Hui
Pan Hui is a chair professor of Computational Media and Arts thrust at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (Guangzhou), a chair professor of the Academy of Interdisciplinary Studies, and a Director of the HKUST-DT Systems and Media Lab, Hong Kong University of Science and Technology.