Iteratively Designing Gesture Vocabularies: A Survey and Analysis of Best Practices in the HCI Literature

Gestural interaction has evolved from a set of novel interaction techniques developed in research labs, to a dominant interaction modality used by millions of users everyday. Despite its widespread adoption, the design of appropriate gesture vocabularies remains a challenging task for developers and designers. Existing research has largely used Expert-Led, User-Led, or Computationally-Based methodologies to design gesture vocabularies. These methodologies leverage the expertise, experience, and capabilities of experts, users, and systems to fulfill different requirements. In practice, however, none of these methodologies provide designers with a complete, multi-faceted perspective of the many factors that influence the design of gesture vocabularies, largely because a singular set of factors has yet to be established. Additionally, these methodologies do not identify or emphasize the subset of factors that are crucial to consider when designing for a given use case. Therefore, this work reports on the findings from an exhaustive literature review that identified 13 factors crucial to gesture vocabulary design and examines the evaluation methods and interaction techniques commonly associated with each factor. The identified factors also enable a holistic examination of existing gesture design methodologies from a factor-oriented viewpoint and highlighting the strengths and weaknesses of each methodology. This work closes with proposals of future research directions of developing an iterative user-centered and factor-centric gesture design approach as well as establishing an evolving ecosystem of factors that are crucial to gesture design.