Designing Touch Gestures Using the Space around the Smartwatch as Continuous Input Space

Small touchscreen interfaces such as a smartwatch have usability problems due to the small screen. One solution to these problems is to utilize the space around the smartwatch as continuous input space for the touchscreen interface. We defined four steps for a gesture that starts on the touchscreen and continues in the air. The goal of this definition was to bring the experience of large touchscreen devices into a smartwatch usage. We compared design options for the four steps and made decisions for the options based on the results of four user experiments. We expect that gestures designed based on these decisions will be both easy to learn and robust.