The People's Gaze: Co-Designing and Refining Gaze Gestures with General Users and Gaze Interaction Experts
This addresses the need for more intuitive gaze-based interaction in mobile devices, though it is incremental as it builds on existing gesture design methods.
The researchers tackled the problem of misaligned, expert-designed gaze gestures by co-designing intuitive gestures with non-experts and refining them with experts, resulting in a set of 32 user-grounded gestures and design principles for hands-free interfaces.
As eye-tracking becomes increasingly common in modern mobile devices, the potential for hands-free, gaze-based interaction grows, but current gesture sets are largely expert-designed and often misaligned with how users naturally move their eyes. To address this gap, we introduce a two-phase methodology for developing intuitive gaze gestures. First, four co-design workshops with 20 non-expert participants generated 102 initial concepts. Next, four gaze interaction experts reviewed and refined these into a set of 32 gestures. We found that non-experts, after a brief introduction, intuitively anchor gestures in familiar metaphors and develop a compositional grammar; i.e., activation (dwell) + action (gaze gesture or blink), to ensure intentionality and mitigate the classic Midas Touch problem. Experts prioritized gestures that are ergonomically sound, aligned with natural saccades, and reliably distinguishable. The resulting user-grounded, expert-validated gesture set, along with actionable design principles, provides a foundation for developing intuitive, hands-free interfaces for gaze-enabled devices.