PinchList: Leveraging Pinch Gestures for Hierarchical List Navigation on Smartphones

Intensive exploration and navigation of hierarchical lists on smartphones can be tedious and time-consuming as it often requires users to frequently switch between multiple views. To overcome this limitation, we present PinchList, a novel interaction design that leverages pinch gestures to support seamless exploration of multi-level list items in hierarchical views. With PinchList, sub-lists are accessed with a pinch-out gesture whereas a pinch-in gesture navigates back to the previous level. Additionally, pinch and flick gestures are used to navigate lists consisting of more than two levels. We conduct a user study to refine the design parameters of PinchList such as a suitable item size, and quantitatively evaluate the target acquisition performance using pinch-in/out gestures in both scrolling and non-scrolling conditions. In a second study, we compare the performance of PinchList in a hierarchal navigation task with two commonly used touch interfaces for list browsing: pagination and expand-and-collapse interfaces. The results reveal that PinchList is significantly faster than other two interfaces in accessing items located in hierarchical list views. Finally, we demonstrate that PinchList enables a host of novel applications in list-based interaction.

Recommended citation: Han, T., Liu, J., Hasan, K., Fan, M., Kim, J., Li, J., Fan, X., Tian, F., Lank, E., & Irani, P. (2019). Pinchlist: Leveraging pinch gestures for hierarchical list navigation on smartphones. Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems - Proceedings. https://doi.org/10.1145/3290605.3300731
Download Paper