Bezel Swipe: Conflict-Free Scrolling and Multiple Selection on Mobile Touch Screen Devices

Zooming user interfaces are increasingly popular on mobile devices with touch screens. Swiping and pinching finger gestures anywhere on the screen manipulate the displayed portion of a page, and taps open objects within the page. This makes navigation easy but limits other manipulations of objects that would be supported naturally by the same gestures, notably cut and paste, multiple selection, and drag and drop. A popular device that suffers from this limitation is Apple’s iPhone. In this paper, we present Bezel Swipe, an interaction technique that supports multiple selection, cut, copy, paste and other operations without interfering with zooming, panning, tapping and other pre-defined gestures. Participants of our user study found Bezel Swipe to be a viable alternative to direct touch selection.