Usability of a domain-specific language for a gesture-driven IDE

Abstract

User interfaces (UIs) are advancing in every direction. The usage of touch screen devices and adaptation their UIs lives its boom. However integrated development environments (IDEs) that are used to develop the same UIs are oversleeping the time. They are directed to developing usable software, but forgot to be usable by themselves. Our goal is to design a new way of user interaction for common IDEs with the help of touch. The target group are hybrid devices formed by a physical keyboard and either an integrated, or separate, touch screen display. In this paper we describe a set of general purpose and domain-specific gestures which represents a language for working with a touchdriven IDE and provide a method their design. We performed two studies with developers from industry and university and developed a prototype of a gesture-driven IDE to evaluate the usability of the presented approach.