Finger aerobics on the screen - touch gestures must be intuitive

Swipe to the left or right or up and down — these are gestures that every smartphone owner knows. Other gestures for use on touchscreens or laptop touchpads tend to be known only to advanced users. Here’s an overview: The one finger tip and swipe: The one finger movement is the mother of all gestures for touchscreens. “With one finger an app is generally started,” says Roland Stehle from Germany’s Society for Entertainment and Communications Electronics (gfu). The one finger tip gesture is also used to scroll up and down on the screen or to move to the left or right.

The gesture is built on experiences from the real world and the movement therefore seems natural, says Katrin Wolf from the Institute for Visualization and Interactive Systems (VIS) at the University of Stuttgart.

Two finger drag: It’s also intuitive to use two fingers for pushing something together or pulling it apart and that’s the gesture most commonly used for zooming in and out. It’s like kneading clay or dough, says Wolf. Dragging enlarges the dough and compressing it makes it more compact.

Rotation: Making a rotary motion with the finger on a screen or touchpad typically rotates the image or document. With some smartphones the device is rotated instead to achieve the same effect.

Multi-finger swipe: This gesture is available on some touchpads and tablets. “From a motor perspective I can use several fingers for more coarse things,” says Tom Gross, a professor of human-computer interaction at the University of Bamberg in Germany. The gesture is not used, for example, within an application but to switch between open applications. On a MacBook the four-finger swipe can be used to hide all windows and show the desktop.

User-defined gestures: Users can also define for themselves what a gesture will do, for example using a swipe on the numeric keyboard to unlock the screen. Gross believes the future will see a hybrid form of pre-defined and self-conceived gestures coming to the fore.

Shake: In addition to finger tip touches, swiping and rotating there are gestures that involve the entire hand. For example shaking to make a music player jump to the next track, says Stehle. “On other devices it’s similar to a shake of the head,” for example to reject a phone call.

Tilt: This gesture can have different effects. Sometimes it signals zooming in or out. In other cases it can mute the phone if the user puts the device down with the screen facing down, says Stehle.

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