A Reimagination of Interface Design: Quick, Draw!
By: Gary Tse
Tags: Leap Motion, Game Design, Games, Draw, Design

From interacting with the game Quick, Draw! we learned that we had to map the input of the mouse onto new instructions using Leap Motion. The two actions of the mouse that we had to map were:

dragging of the cursor across the screen clicking of the cursor on specific options.

By mapping just the mouse we can easily interact with all the different screens in the game Quick, Draw!

Wizard-of-Oz

Based on the recommendation on the project document, we wanted to do the “Wizard-of-Oz” of our idea with other students. However, one of the difficulty we faced with doing so was that Quick, Draw! involved tracking hand in the free space. When a participant was interacting with the game, it was extremely challenging for the controller to replicate or mimic those actions. Hence, our team decided that rather than focusing extensively on “Wizard-of-Oz”, we would just prototype different gestures directly on our code to check how well they perform.

Testing Different Gestures

Implementing the first mouse action (dragging of the cursor across the screen) was very straightforward. We decided to keep track of the index finger for the purpose. The challenging part was identifying the “best gesture” for the clicking of the cursor. We came up with several options for gestures, and for each of the gestures, we did testing with users to see how “intuitive” they were. The article “Introduction to Motion Control” was very helpful in a better understanding of what it means to be an intuitive design and how we can make intuitive interfaces. Based on the article, we looked for these three main properties in our design to deem it intuitive:

Learnable Understandable Habitual

We used this definition with our users during our testing as well.

After gaining valuable feedback from our users, we figured that the pinch gesture was the most effective of all when it came to clicking, although it did have some problems associated with it. The users felt that pinching was more intuitive, compared to others.

User Feedback

We conducted some user testing with three questions formatted for the users to answer. The question prompts are: I like, I wish, what if? I like is some design choice or feature that the user liked during the testing. I wish is something that might be infeasible that the user would like changed. This change might be one in a design approach or game selection. What if is a feasible change that the user believes should be implemented in the given game/controls.

I like, I wish, What if?

The users loved the new ability to use their fingers to draw as that is more physically intuitive to the users than using a mouse. What the users did not like was how glitchy the Leap Motion device seemed to be. It proved to be somewhat of a challenge for the device to keep track of the user hand positions making it so that their drawings would jump around on the screen.

Conclusion

We learned that while our approach to the game was incredibly intuitive, the actual technology required to implement our design was lacking. While we were testing our application, we found that Leap Motion was unable to properly capture the motions of the hand while drawing. There were issues where the game would lose track of where the finger was in relation to the screen such that drawing became sloppy or incredibly slow. If we were provided a better technology to track user hand gestures we believe that drawing with the hands will be much more fun for users.