Challenging Documentation Practices for Interactions in Natural User Interfaces

Dozens of novel natural interaction techniques are proposed every year to enrich interactive eco-systems with multitouch gestures, motion gestures, full body in motion, etc. We present a novel investigation of the community’s applied documentation practices for Natural User Interfaces (NUI). Our investigation includes analyzing a survey targeted at NUI designers and a large sample of recently published multitouch and motion-based interaction papers. To the best of our knowledge, this paper is the first to offer a close investigation of this kind. The results reveal that good NUI documentation practices are rare and largely compromised. Thus, we argue that engineering interactive systems for large-scale dynamic runtime deployment of existing interaction techniques is greatly challenged.