PinchList: Leveraging pinch gestures for hierarchical list navigation on smartphones

• Main Authors: HAN, Teng, LIU, Jie, HASAN, Khalad, FAN, Mingming, KIM, Junhyeok, LI, Jiannan, FAN, Xiangmin, TIAN, Feng, LANK, Edward, IRANI, Pourang
• Format: text
• Language: English
• Published: Institutional Knowledge at Singapore Management University 2019
• Subjects: Pinch gesture; Hierarchical list navigation; touchscreen; Graphics and Human Computer Interfaces
• Online Access: https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/sis_research/8061; https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/context/sis_research/article/9064/viewcontent/pinchlist.pdf
• Institution: Singapore Management University

Intensive exploration and navigation of hierarchical lists on smartphones can be tedious and time-consuming as it often requires users to frequently switch between multiple views. To overcome this limitation, we present PinchList, a novel interaction design that leverages pinch gestures to support seamless exploration of multi-level list items in hierarchical views. With PinchList, sub-lists are accessed with a pinch-out gesture whereas a pinch-in gesture navigates back to the previous level. Additionally, pinch and flick gestures are used to navigate lists consisting of more than two levels. We conduct a user study to refine the design parameters of PinchList such as a suitable item size, and quantitatively evaluate the target acquisition performance using pinch-in/out gestures in both scrolling and non-scrolling conditions. In a second study, we compare the performance of PinchList in a hierarchal navigation task with two commonly used touch interfaces for list browsing: pagination and expand-and-collapse interfaces. The results reveal that PinchList is significantly faster than other two interfaces in accessing items located in hierarchical list views. Finally, we demonstrate that PinchList enables a host of novel applications in list-based interaction?