Reclaiming Microinteractions for People with Motor Disabilities

A variety of diseases, injuries and medical conditions can lead to motor impairments in people of all ages. These motor impairments can take the form of, for example, paralysis, muscle weakness or spacticity, or difficulty speaking, swallowing or breathing. Any of these can result in difficulty performing many everyday tasks such as bathing, dressing, eating, housework, any many other things people do every day. Many of these tasks can be considered microinteractions. Using current assistive technology there is nothing micro about microinteractions. Even with state of the art systems, the overhead of turning on the lights is the same as that of composing an email: for a wheelchair user with a computer on his or her chair, before even starting the actual task, the user must navigate to an icon for the appropriate application, and find the right section of the application, and finally begin the actual task. This can be quite taxing when one simply wants to turn on the lights. Indeed, the inherent microness of such interactions suggests that they should be treated differently than other tasks. Microinteractions are formally defined as interactions with a device taking less than four seconds to complete [1]. This threshold was determined in relation to use of mobile devices in situations where a user’s attention is divided among multiple activities [2]. Oulasvirta et al. found that interactions with mobile devices tended to happen in four to eight second bursts, and reccomend that interactions be designed to take less than five seconds [3]. In the context of mobile microinteractions, common examples are checking the weather, reading a text message, or performing a quick calculation. More broadly, microinteractions out in the world are activities like flipping a lightswitch or changing the channel on a TV. Because the focus here is not on interaction with mobile devices, the four second cutoff will be eschewed in favor of an informal definition only requiring that the interactions be short. Microinteractions can be segmented into two phases: access, and usage [1]. For the task of using assistive technology to turn on a light, the access involves opening the application for interacting with the automation system and navigating to the proper location within the interface. The usage phase is simply pressing the correct button. This breakdown enables evaluating interactions based on their access time to usage time ratio, and can inform interaction design influencing