When exhibiting at a trade show, you always want to present something that's cool in order to get the attention of passersby. These days, it's not uncommon for exhibitors to use touch-screen interfaces to encourage people to interact with their display and step inside their booth.
When we decided to exhibit at this year's Dx3 conference, we wanted to engage attendees a bit differently.
Going touchless
We had already been test-driving motion-controlled devices like the
Microsoft Kinect (for Windows) and
Leap Motion, and decided it would be interesting to use one of these "touchless" formats as the input for responding to a web-based survey as part of our trade show exhibit.
We went back and forth between using the Kinect and Leap, and ultimately decided on using the Leap Motion. The decision was based on a few factors, but primarily because it had the lowest barrier to getting a usable website up and running in a short amount of time, and it was easier to get running on a Mac.
Designing for motion control
From there, we designed a very basic website that guides users through a couple of straightforward questions, with very large buttons to make the 'hit-zone' as unmissable as possible.
The Leap Motion essentially turns a user's pointer finger into a mouse cursor, and when they gesture their finger towards the screen it acts as a mouse click.
Overall response
The average user struggled to get accustomed to using the device, and particularly when trying to hit the 'Next Question' button. In an ideal scenario, we would have ran the survey through usability testing prior to presenting it at Dx3 and ironed out any of the challenges that the touchless interface presented. But in this case, we simply didn't have time.
The typical response from attendees at the trade show was that a touchless device was very difficult to use for this type of an application. And this was understandable – after all, we were using it in a high-traffic environment in a format that required precise actions from a cursor movement.
There was a very high learning curve to get the feel for how the Leap Motion worked in the first place, but even once users figured out the basics, it still required a level of fine motor skills that many were lacking (or didn't have the patience to work out).
Our conclusion
The Leap Motion – while being an incredible device – isn't quite at a place where it can be used to easily navigate websites.
Once we had observed a number of people use the Leap Motion with the survey website, we realized there were changes we could have made to make it easier to use, such as eliminating the small "Next Question" button altogether in favour of an automated pass to the next question.
But in the end, the difficulties we encountered with the already-oversized Next Question button indicated the inherent problems there are with using a Leap Motion to navigate a website.
With all of that being said, the Leap Motion does have a number of other useful purposes. For instance, native applications specially designed for the Leap Motion allow users full hand and gesture control that's optimized for this type of input, and require less fine motor control.
And as we've pointed out before, Elon Musk finds it to be a useful tool when 3D modelling parts for SpaceX rockets.
Survey results
Even though it wasn't the easiest survey to answer, we tracked the results. Stay tuned to see the results of our Dx3 survey on desktop, mobile and tablet usage.
