BinarySwipes: Fast List Search on Small Touchscreens

Abstract

Smartwatches and other wearables generally have small screens, thereby complicating touch-based interaction. Selection from a long list, e.g. to locate a contact or a music track, is particularly cumbersome due to the limited interaction space. We present BinarySwipes, an interaction technique based on binary search which is designed to speed up list search tasks on space-constrained screens. We evaluate a prototypical implementation of BinarySwipes on a smartwatch. Results from our evaluation with 21 participants show improved performance over a plain linear search on lists with 100, 200, and 500 entries, but also increased mental load on the users.