| dc.description.abstract | Multi-selection is the act of selecting a set of elements on a graphical user interface in order to perform one or more operations on that set. Multi-selection is used, for example, to select thumbnails in an image gallery, in order to perform an action, such as uploading, deleting, or editing. This thesis builds on prior work that specifies multi-selection formally as a reusable feature for mouse-based interfaces. In this thesis we extend the formalism to touch-screen devices. The thesis also reports on Multiselect-Android, our implementation of the formalism for the Android platform.
The analysis and evaluation of the presented multi-selection framework were conducted in two stages. The first stage compares the implementation effort when a developer implements multi-selection using Multiselect-Android with the effort when using traditional vendor-provided GUI libraries. The second stage evaluates how easy and effective it is for users to select multiple elements using different kinds of multi-selection features. A user study that we conducted shows that multi-selection using Multiselect-Android is faster than using features that are common in today’s applications. To summarize, this thesis defines generic selection semantics for touchscreen devices, describes a reference implementation, and compares the semantics with existing practice. | en |
