A Convenient Interface for Video Navigation on Smartphones

In this work, the authors present a video navigation interface optimized for smartphones. The design is inspired by the 'Click Wheel' interface originally used by Apple iPod TM devices: it utilizes a dedicated touch-enabled circular area that can be used with wipe gestures for content navigation in videos. The user winds clockwise to navigate forward and winds counter-clockwise to navigate backward. The authors evaluate this interface in direct comparison to the default video player interface on Apple smartphones and show that the proposed interface significantly outperforms the default video player in terms of search performance (i.e., in the amount of retrieved scenes for content search tasks). Furthermore, the evaluation of subjective workload shows that this 'Scrubbing Wheel' interface produces significantly less mental, physical, and temporal demand, and provides significantly better support for content search in videos. Also, users can perform smoother navigation in video and perceive the interface as more fun to use.