Pointing Device Gesture - Drawbacks

Drawbacks

A major drawback of current gesture interaction solutions is the lack of support for two necessary user interface design principles, feedback and visibility (or affordance). Feedback notification is required to indicate whether the gesture has been entered correctly by indicating the gesture recognized and the corresponding command activated, although Sensiva does approach this to some extent in providing voice notification. The other principle is visibility of gestures, providing the user some means of learning the necessary gestures and the contexts they can be used in. Both Mouse Gestures for Internet Explorer and ALToolbar Mouse Gestures display colored tracers that indicate the current motion that the user is taking to facilitate visual clues for the user. Also pie menus and marking menus have been proposed as solutions for both problems, since they support learning of the available options but can also be used with quick gestures. The recent versions of Opera (11 and above) uses an on-screen pie menu to simply and non-obstructively display which mouse gestures are available and how to activate them, providing feedback and visibility in some way .

One limitation with gesture interaction is the scope context in which the gestures can be used. For example each gesture has only one corresponding command for each application window.

Holding down buttons while moving the mouse can be awkward and requires some practice, since the downwards action increases friction for the horizontal motion. An optical mouse would be less susceptible to changes in behavior than a ball mouse with increased friction because the sensor does not rely on mechanical contact to sense movement; a touchpad provides no added friction with all its buttons held down with a thumb. However, it was also argued that muscular tension resulting from holding down buttons could be exploited in user interface design as it gives constant feedback that the user is in a temporary state, or mode (Buxton, 1995).