Priming users with babies’ gestures: Investigating the influences of priming with different development origin of image schemas in gesture elicitation study

Gesture elicitation study is an effective method to design gestures for various contexts. Through involving end-users, GES results in intuitive gestures because they directly reflect end-users’ mental models and preferences. However, limited by personal experience, end-users are not capable of taking full advantages of technology while proposing gestures, which is referred as legacy bias. To overcome this, previous studies demonstrate that users’ performance can be improved by priming, such as viewing gestures, watching fictional movies, and experiencing framed scenarios. This research extends this line of studies by considering the developmental origin of image schemas in priming. More specifically, we compared the influences of no-priming, priming with early image schemas (EIS), and priming with late image schemas (LIS) on GES. Controlled experiments were conducted (N = 120) along the three stages of GES: users’ generation of gestures (Experiment 1), final gesture sets (Experiment 2), and end-users’ learnability of gestures (Experiment 3). Results show that users are largely influenced by developmental origin of image schemas in priming. LIS-priming improve gesture proposal production in comparison to no-priming condition. As for end-users’ evaluation, EIS-priming gestures exhibit higher initial and overall learnability.