Break Away from Button-UI to Gesture Operation on Touch Device

Abstract

A web browser application for iOS, Libing, proposes a solution to resolve the problems of complicated button-based user interface (UI). The authors implement a gesture-based UI in Libing to realize simple and plentiful operations. Libing also keeps available display area maximum. Users can memorize correspondence between gestures and operations easily because users can assign arbitrary gestures to any operations and/or URLs flexibly in Libing. Touch-input-devices as typified by smartphones and tablet PCs have become popular recently. The market of these application programs has grown continuously. The most application programs are operated by the button-based UI. We can understand it visually. And the button-based UI is popular because we do not have incorrect operations when buttons are sufficiently large. However if we want to assign a lot of functions to buttons, we have to prepare many small buttons and/or a large area on which we place many buttons. We might have to divide the area to several pages to place all buttons. At least the user experience will be compromised because users have a lot of incorrect operations, available display area is compromised and operations become to be complicated. This study gives a solution to these problems which compromise the user experience.