  Consumers conducting comparison shopping, researchers making sense of
competitive space, and developers looking for code snippets online all face the
challenge of capturing the information they find for later use without
interrupting their current flow. In addition, during many learning and
exploration tasks, people need to externalize their mental context, such as
estimating how urgent a topic is to follow up on, or rating a piece of evidence
as a "pro" or "con," which helps scaffold subsequent deeper exploration.
However, current approaches incur a high cost, often requiring users to select,
copy, context switch, paste, and annotate information in a separate document
without offering specific affordances that capture their mental context. In
this work, we explore a new interaction technique called "wiggling," which can
be used to fluidly collect, organize, and rate information during early
sensemaking stages with a single gesture. Wiggling involves rapid
back-and-forth movements of a pointer or up-and-down scrolling on a smartphone,
which can indicate the information to be collected and its valence, using a
single, light-weight gesture that does not interfere with other interactions
that are already available. Through implementation and user evaluation, we
found that wiggling helped participants accurately collect information and
encode their mental context with a 58% reduction in operational cost while
being 24% faster compared to a common baseline.
