Replicating User-defined Gestures for Text Editing

Although initial ideas for building intuitive and usable handwriting applications originated nearly 30 years ago, recent advances in stylus technology and handwriting recognition are now making handwriting a viable text-entry option on touchscreen devices. In this paper, we use modern methods to replicate studies form the 80's to elicit hand-drawn gestures from users for common text-editing tasks in order to determine a "guessable' gesture set and to determine if the early results still apply given the ubiquity of touchscreen devices today. We analyzed 360 gestures, performed with either the finger or stylus, from 20 participants for 18 tasks on a modern tablet device. Our findings indicate that the mental model of "writing on paper' found in past literature largely holds even today, although today's users' mental model also appears to support manipulating the paper elements as opposed to annotating. In addition, users prefer using the stylus to finger touch for text editing, and we found that manipulating "white space' is complex. We present our findings as well as a stylus-based, user-defined gesture set for text editing.