Katie Dahmen
Discussion, Visual Similarity, Long

Long mentions that the participants in the similarity
experiments were recruited from the student body.  I think it would be
interesting to have more information about participants, such as what
hobbies they have, if they like art or sports or other activities that
involve movement, in light of Howard Gardener's theory of multiple
intelligences (see http://www.cookps.act.edu.au/mi_bodily.htm ).  Maybe
people with some of these sorts of hobbies or professions would tend to have
a different reaction to how they categorize shapes as different.  It would
also be interesting to know how other populations besides a student body who
are familiar with computers would react to the use of gesture recognition -
if less computer-literate people might have an easier time remembering
gestures than keyboard shortcuts, or if the opposite is true.  It might
offer some insight as to what types of programs might be best to include
gesture recognition, i.e. a drawing program for artists, a design tool for
construction workers or CAD for engineers, a music writing program for
musicians.  It might also give an idea of how finely-tuned the set of
gestures for these applications would in general need to be to make them
sufficiently easy but maximally useful for the target consumer type.

           I wonder if their experiment suggesting that similar gestures
for similar effects are easier to remember will lead them to try to advise
people who are creating gestures, like *quill *does, of this guideline.   Will
they let the user just group similar actions manually, or put it in the
instruction manual, or have prepackaged actions like copy/cut/paste which
are similar by default?

           I also sort of suspect that people may perceive two gestures as
dissimilar but tend to draw them similarly, such as a 'u' and a 'v' or a
spiral and a zigzag.  To me, something with a sharp corner is different from
a curve, or something with an intersection is different from one that has no
intersections, but if I were to draw a gesture in a hurry, or without being
able to see the trail of my drawing implement, I might be sloppy and slide
into the other type of gesture, which could create frustration.