Help systems for gestural interfaces and their effect on collaboration and communication

Abstract

Due to limited discoverability and standardization, people often have difficulties with learning and remembering all the gestures of a gestural interface. To overcome these difficulties, help systems are integrated to enable users to quickly explore the available gestures. These systems typically target single-user applications and research is mainly focused on studying the efficiency of various kinds of help. In this paper, we study textual and animated help in a collaborative tabletop game. We not only consider the efficiency of the help systems, but we also examine how they impact collaboration and communication. Our study shows that animated help has a positive effect on the level of collaboration, as users work together to explore and learn the game.