Design of E-mail Client Interaction (MCI) System for Representing Physical Movements through Gesture-initiated Pressing Operations

摘要

While the advancement of digital technologies is making our life more convenient, the sensation we feel while using analog tools or contrivances might be lost with digital devices. It negatively affects the joy of or motivation toward using digital content, and often causes various problems related to content use when user’s awareness declines due to the lack of sensory reality. For example, while we can conveniently send an email with a single click with today’s email clients, we often experience email issues such as sending one to an unintended recipient due to mistouching or using a wrong address. This is caused by ‘sending an email’ with a single click, which deprives the user of the sensory reality of the operation. This study focuses on the email client interface and aims to represent the sensation of mailing a letter by integrating the pressing gesture operation. In this paper, we propose an email client interaction (MCI) system which realizes physical movements of ‘sending a mail/holding out a letter’ by the 3-dimensional, pressure-sensitive functionality (3D Touch). We also design an email interface to be operated only by gestures, featuring a 4-direction display interface, and devise a mechanism to detect / notify mistakes in the email content, using the function to give feedbacks of different pressure intensities. The study emphasizes the sensory reality of emailing tasks by integrating above functions and proposes a method to prevent email mistakes by improving users’ awareness while emailing. Thus we present and consider a possible design method, which incorporates an element of sensory reality.