Awareness, Usage and Discovery of Swipe-revealed Hidden Widgets in iOS
Revealing a hidden widget with a dedicated sliding gesture is a common interaction design in today's handheld devices. Such "Swhidgets" (for swipe-revealed hidden widgets) provide a fast (and sometime unique) access to some commands. Interestingly, swhidgets do not follow conventional design guidelines in that they have no explicit signifiers, and users have to discover their existence before being able to use them. In this paper, we discuss the benefits of this signifierless design and investigate how iOS users deal with this type of widgets. We report on the results of a laboratory study and an online survey, investigating iOS users' experience with swhidgets. Our results suggest that swhidgets~are moderately but unevenly known by participants, yet the awareness and the discovery issues of this design is worthy of further discussion.
The possibility that the longitudinal slit coupling structure to the parasitic strip conductor may be used in the leaky wave antenna design of a microstrip type has been tested. The radiation pattern and matching characteristics of a fabricated antenna were measured, and a comparison between the theoretical and the experimental results was given.