Gesture Search: A Tool for Fast Mobile Data Access

Modern mobile phones can store a large amount of data, such as contacts, applications and music. However, it is difficult to access specific data items via existing mobile user interfaces. In this paper, we present Gesture Search, a tool that allows a user to quickly access various data items on a mobile phone by drawing gestures on its touch screen. Gesture Search contributes a unique way of combining gesture-based interaction and search for fast mobile data access. It also demonstrates a novel approach for coupling gestures with standard GUI interaction. A real world deployment with mobile phone users showed that Gesture Search enabled fast, easy access to mobile data in their dayto-day lives. Gesture Search has been released to public and is currently in use by hundreds of thousands of mobile users.It was rated positively by users, with a mean of 4.5 out of 5 for over 5000 ratings.