“I Didn’t Know, You Could Do That” - Affordance Signifiers for Touch Gestures on Mobile Devices

Abstract

As smartphones have become widely available at low prices, interface designers need to improve accessibility of mobile applications for e.g. illiterate users. We evaluated how effectively and efficiently different signifiers communicated the affordances of dragging and double tapping touch gestures in a text editor environment. We found that spatially represented signifiers for dragging (drag handles and drop shadow) communicated the affordance better than temporal signifiers for double tapping. The latter appeared only for a limited amount of time in the user interface and were less effective and efficient than even a control condition that provided no additional information.