“QOC design rationale represents argumentation about design alternatives and assessments. It can be used to generate design spaces which capture and integrate information from design discussions and diverse kinds of theoretical analyses. Such design spaces highlight how different theoretical approaches can work together to help solve design problems. This paper describes an example of the generation of a multi-disciplinary QOC design space which shows how designers' deliberations can be augmented with design contributions from a combination of different theoretical HCI approaches.”
“Today's interface design tools either force designers to handle a tremendous number of design details, or limit their control over design decisions. Neither of these approaches taps the true strengths of either human designers or computers in the design process. This paper presents a human-computer collaborative system that uses a model-based approach for interface design to help designers search the design space effectively and construct executable specifications of application user interfaces. This human-in-the-loop environment focuses human designers on decision making, and utilizes the bookkeeping capabilities of computers for regular and tedious tasks. We describe (a) the underlying modeling technique and an execution environment that allows even incompletely-specified designs to be executed for evaluation and testing purposes, and (b) a tool that decomposes high-level design goals into the necessary implementation steps, and helps designers manage the myriad of details that arise during design.”
“This paper describes the evolution of the interface to Life Forms, a compositional tool for the creation of dance choreography, and highlights some of the important lessons we have learned during a six year design and implementation period. The lessons learned can be grouped into two categories: 1) Process, and 2) Architecture of the Interface. Our goal in developing a tool for choreography has been to provide computer-based creative design support for the conception and development of dance. The evolution was driven by feedback from the choreographers and users who were members of the development team, combined with our knowledge of current thinking on design and composition. Although the interface evolved in a relatively unconstrained way, the resulting system has many of the features that theoretical discussion in human interface design has projected as necessary. The Life Forms interface has evolved incrementally with one major discontinuity where adoption of a new compositional primitive required a completely new version. The choreography and composition of a dance is a complex synthesis task which has much in common with design. Thus, the lessons learned here are applicable to the development of interfaces to such applications as computer aided design.”
“The Human-Machine Perceptual Cooperation (HMPC) paradigm combines a human operator's high level reasoning with machine perception to solve spatio-perceptual intensive problems. HMPC defines two channels of interaction: the focus of attention (FOA) by which the user directs the attention of machine perception, and context. As the user moves the FOA across a display via a pointing device, a smart cursor operates proactively on the data, highlighting objects which satisfy the current context. The FOA permits foveal emphasis, enabling the user to vary motor precision with image clutter. HMPC provides for contexts at four levels of abstraction. This permits the efficiency of the system to degrade gracefully as data quality worsens. We describe a document analysis application to which HMPC is applied. In this project, a human operator works with a machine to convert scanned raster maps into vector format.”
“A new approach to interacting with stored video is proposed. The approach utilizes VideoMAP and VideoSpaceIcon. VideoMAP is the interface that shows the essential video features in an easy to perceive manner. VideoSpaceIcon represents the temporal and spatial characteristics of a video shot as an intuitive icon. A video indexing method supports both tools. These tools allow the user's creativity to directly interact with the essential features of each video by offering spatial and temporal clues. This paper introduces the basic concept and describes prototype versions of the tools as implemented in a video handling system. VideoMAP and VideoSpaceIcon are effective for video handling functions such as video content analysis, video editing, and various video applications which need an intuitive visual interface.”
“We developed intelligent functions for the automatic description of video structure, and visualization methods for temporal-spatial video structures obtained by these functions as well as for the functions. The functions offer descriptions of cut separations, motion of the camera and filmed objects, tracks and contour lines of objects, existence of objects, and periods of existence. Furthermore, identical objects are automatically linked. Thus the visualization methods supported by object-links allow users to freely browse and directly manipulate the structure including descriptions and raw video data.”
“Visual programming systems are supposed to simplify programming by capitalizing on innate human spatial reasoning skills. I argue that: (i) good visual programming environments should be oriented toward their application domains, and (ii) tools to build domain-oriented environments are needed because building such environments from scratch is very difficult. The demonstration illustrates how the visual programming system builder called Agentsheets addresses these issues and demonstrates several applications built using Agentsheets.”
“Mondrian is a object-oriented graphical editor that can learn new graphical procedures through programming by demonstration. A user can demonstrate a sequence of graphical editing commands on a concrete example to illustrate how the new procedure should work. An interface agent records the steps of the procedure in a symbolic form, using machine learning techniques, tracking relationships between graphical objects and dependencies among the interface operations. The agent generalizes a program that can then be used on "analogous" examples. The generalization heuristics set it apart from conventional "macros" that can only repeat an exact sequence of steps. The system represents user-defined operations using pictorial "storyboards" of examples. By bringing the power of procedural programming to easy-to-use graphical interfaces, we hope to break down the "Berlin Wall" that currently exists between computer users and computer programmers.”
“This panel will consider the role of usability measurement in the design process. It will address the time needed to perform usability evaluations and compare this process with that of expert assessment. This topic will be discussed in the industrial context of developing computer products within strict timescales. However it will also be seen against the traditional problem of needing to set usability goals and to measure their achievement if usability is to be given the same priority as the more technical software engineering objectives.”
“This research follows a group of users over time (16 months) as they progress from novice towards expert in their use of Lotus 1-2-3. Quantitative and qualitative measures of performance are compared with expert users having over three years of experience. The results indicate that the motor aspects of performance are relatively stable over time, while improvement in the cognitive components of the skill are dependent on aspects of the menu structure and how many things must be retrieved from memory, among other things. These results imply extensions to the Keystroke Level Model of skilled performance as well as suggest ways to design the user interfaces so as to speed the acquisition of expertise.”
“We identify an important type of software design knowledge that we call community specific folklore and show problems with current approaches to managing it. We built a tool that serves as a living design memory for a large software development organization. The tool delivers knowledge to developers effectively and is embedded in organizational practice to ensure that the knowledge it contains evolves as necessary. This work illustrates important lessons in building knowledge management systems, integrating novel technology into organizational practice, and managing research-development partnerships.”
“Computational critiquing mechanisms provide an effective form of computer-human interaction supporting the process of design. Critics embedded in domain-oriented design environments can take advantage of additional knowledge residing in these environments to provide less intrusive, more relevant critiques. Three classes of embedded critics have been designed, implemented, and studied: Generic critics use domain knowledge to detect problematic situations in the design construction. Specific critics take advantage of additional knowledge in the partial specification to detect inconsistencies between the design construction and the design specification. Interpretive critics are tied to perspective mechanisms that support designers in examining their artifact from different viewpoints.”
“Aiding functions may be added to a computer system, so that users with insufficient knowledge can perform their tasks. The aiding should be integrated into the task execution of such users. Empirical knowledge is lacking about the conditions for successful aiding. We evaluated the on-line help system of the statistical software package SPSS/PC. It appears that the addition of help facilities to the system worsens the task performance and learning of novices substantially. In our view, the addition of help is harmful, because communication with the system is more complex as a result, whereas the help hardly provides the task support that novices need. De Greef et al. [5] provide two design principles that result in consistent communication and aiding in correspondence with users' needs: (i) the design of aiding functions is an integrated part of interface design and (ii) aiding is based upon an expert model of the users' task. We evaluated an interface for the statistical program HOMALS, which was designed according to these principles. As a consequence of the addition of aiding functions, non-expert users perform their tasks better and learn more.”
“Multimodal interaction enables the user to employ different modalities such as voice, gesture and typing for communicating with a computer. This paper presents an analysis of the integration of multiple communication modalities within an interactive system. To do so, a software engineering perspective is adopted. First, the notion of "multimodal system" is clarified. We aim at proving that two main features of a multimodal system are the concurrency of processing and the fusion of input/output data. On the basis of these two features, we then propose a design space and a method for classifying multimodal systems. In the last section, we present a software architecture model of multimodal systems which supports these two salient properties: concurrency of processing and data fusion. Two multimodal systems developed in our team, VoicePaint and NoteBook, are used to illustrate the discussion.”
“VoiceNotes is an application for a voice-controlled hand-held computer that allows the creation, management, and retrieval of user-authored voice notes -- small segments of digitized speech containing thoughts, ideas, reminders, or things to do. Iterative design and user testing helped to refine the initial user interface design. VoiceNotes explores the problem of capturing and retrieving spontaneous ideas, the use of speech as data, and the use of speech input and output in the user interface for a hand-held computer without a visual display. In addition, VoiceNotes serves as a step toward new uses of voice technology and interfaces for future portable devices.”
“The human face is an independent communication channel that conveys emotional and conversational signals encoded as facial displays. Facial displays can be viewed as communicative signals that help coordinate conversation. We are attempting to introduce facial displays into computer-human interaction as a new modality. This will make the interaction tighter and more efficient while lessening the cognitive load. As the first step, a speech dialogue system was selected to investigate the power of communicative facial displays. We analyzed the conversations between users and the speech dialogue system, to which facial displays had been added. We found that conversation with the system featuring facial displays was more successful than that with a system without facial displays.”
“This panel will start to build the bridge between behavioral scientists who know deaf communities worldwide, their languages and cultures, and experts in technical disciplines relating to computers and human interfaces.”
“One of the most promising methods for user interface design is the iterative design methodology. To this point only case study support for this method has been given. There are still many unanswered questions about the effectiveness of this method. One difficulty encountered in user interface design is knowing what set of knowledge and skill the designer must possess to ensure good user interface design. Many different people have designed user interfaces for computer systems. These people came from a variety of backgrounds and viewpoints. Two of the most common groups involved in user interface design are human factors specialists and programmers. This study investigates these two issues. One factor in this study is the iterative design methodology. An empirical evaluation of this method was conducted. The strengths and weaknesses of this method are discussed. A second factor in this study is a comparison of human factors specialists and programmers in an actual user interface design task. The results of this study indicate that iterative design methodology can improve the usability of a product. The amount of the improvement may be constrained by the original design. This study also supports the use of human factors specialists in user interface design. A significant difference between designs produced by human factors specialists and programmers was found.”
“For 11 studies, we find that the detection of usability problems as a function of number of users tested or heuristic evaluators employed is well modeled as a Poisson process. The model can be used to plan the amount of evaluation required to achieve desired levels of thoroughness or benefits. Results of early tests can provide estimates of the number of problems left to be found and the number of additional evaluations needed to find a given fraction. With quantitative evaluation costs and detection values, the model can estimate the numbers of evaluations at which optimal cost/benefit ratios are obtained and at which marginal utility vanishes. For a "medium" example, we estimate that 16 evaluations would be worth their cost, with maximum benefit/cost ratio at four.”
“Two alternative user interface designs were subjected to user testing to measure user performance in a database query task. User performance was also estimated heuristically in three different ways and by use of formal GOMS modelling. The estimated values for absolute user performance had very high variability, but estimates of the relative advantage of the fastest interface were less variable. Choosing the fastest of the two designs would have a net present value more than 1,000 times the cost of getting the estimates. A software manager would make the correct choice every time in our case study if decisions were based on at least three independent estimates. User testing was 4.9 times as expensive as the cheapest heuristic method but provided better performance estimates.”
“An evaluation of earcons was carried out to see whether they are an effective means of communicating information in sound. An initial experiment showed that earcons were better than unstructured bursts of sound and that musical timbres were more effective than simple tones. A second experiment was then carried out which improved upon some of the weaknesses shown up in Experiment 1 to give a significant improvement in recognition. From the results of these experiments some guidelines were drawn up for use in the creation of earcons. Earcons have been shown to be an effective method for communicating information in a human-computer interface.”
“Auditory icons add valuable functionality to computer interfaces, particularly when they are parameterized to convey dimensional information. They are difficult to create and manipulate, however, because they usually rely on digital sampling techniques. This paper suggests that new synthesis algorithms, controlled along dimensions of events rather than those of the sounds themselves, may solve this problem. Several algorithms, developed from research on auditory event perception, are described in enough detail here to permit their implementation. They produce a variety of impact, bouncing, breaking, scraping, and machine sounds. By controlling them with attributes of relevant computer events, a wide range of parameterized auditory icons may be created.”
“Collaborating teams of knowledge workers need a common repository in which to share information gathered by individuals or developed by the team. This is difficult to achieve in practice, because individual information access strategies break down with group information -- people can generally find things that are on their own messy desks and file systems, but not on other people's. The design challenge in a group memory is thus to enable low-effort information sharing without reducing individuals' finding effectiveness. This paper presents the lessons from our design and initial use of a hypertext-based group memory, TeamInfo. We expose the serious cognitive obstacles to a shared information structure, discuss the uses and benefits we have experienced, address the effects of technology limitations, and highlight some unexpected social and work impacts of our group memory.”
“This paper reports the development of a computer-aided conversation prosthesis which is designed for severely physically impaired non-speaking people. The research methodology was to model aspects of conversational structure derived from the field of conversation analysis within a prototype conversational prosthesis. The prototype was evaluated in empirical investigations which also suggested successful strategies for carrying out satisfying conversation using such a system. Two versions have been built and tested, one using an able-bodied operator to test the feasibility of creating conversation from prestored material, the second being used by a physically impaired non-speaking operator. The prototype demonstrated the advantages of this interface design in helping the user to carry out natural sounding and satisfying conversations.”
“The main feature of the MicroCentre research group is a concern for users with a very wide range of characteristics. In addition to main-stream HCI research, it contains the largest academic group in the world investigating the application of computer systems for disabled people, and has a particular interest in systems for people with communication impairment.”
“The MultiG research programme is an effort conducted in broad cooperation between academia and industry with public support. The main goals are to strengthen the academic infrastructure and industrial competitiveness, to integrate the major research sites in Sweden, and to demonstrate operating prototypes of novel applications and Gigabit networking concepts. The spirit of the program is similar to the spirit of the Gigabit research part of the US NREN effort.”
“This paper presents a groupware engine running under Microsoft's Windows developed using a User Interface Management System (UIMS). This groupware engine will demonstrate some of the important groupware features such as concurrency control, security, view control, and how these features are best implemented using a UIMS. By demonstrating these features in a groupware engine the advantages of applying the UIMS methodology will become self evident, as well as, the need for such a methodology.”
“For years the CHI community has championed the importance of the user in system development. As many of us develop systems, we find that the concept of user involvement is not so easy to implement. Does one always strive to involve the user in the design process? Are there situations when the users should not be involved? What if the user is reluctant to change? How is user involvement handled when the user claims to know all the answers and wants to design the entire interface his or her way? What if the users, or even potential users are not available? How can user involvement be accomplished under these developmental restrictions? User Involvement, therefore, may be a goal -- not a given, and how to effect user involvement is not as straight forward as the text books convey! To assist the process of user interface development, many techniques have been developed such as Heuristic Evaluation, Participatory Design, Cognitive Walk Throughs, Task Analysis and Rapid Prototyping. These techniques vary considerably in the extent of user involvement that they require. This panel will attempt to match the technique with the degree of user involvement that the developer is faced with or can achieve. The issues discussed in this session are important to the entire user interface community. Developers will be happy to hear that they are not alone; others have similar problems with users. They will learn which of the techniques are best suited for each development situation. Methodologists will gain greater insight into the breadth and depth of working with, and attempting to satisfy various types of users. They may be able to better refine the technologies we now have available to meet the needs of user interface developers.”
“The development of human computer interaction has been dominated by the interface both as a design concept and as an artifact of computer systems. However, recently researchers have been re-examining the role of the interface in the user's interaction with the computer. This paper further examines the notion of the interface in light of the experiences of the authors in establishing a network to support cooperative work. The authors argue that the concept of the single interface which provides a focus for interaction with a computer system is no longer tenable and that richer conceptions of the inter-relationships between users and computer systems are needed.”
“Despite widespread interest in the human-computer interaction (HCI) field, there remains much debate as to appropriate conceptual frameworks for the field, and even confusion surrounding the meaning of basic terms in the field. HCI is seen by many as focusing on the design of interfaces to computer systems, yet exactly what is implied by this focus on "interfaces" is unclear. In this paper we show how a better understanding of what is meant by the interface is possible via the concept of abstraction levels. We show how this levels approach can clarify some ambiguities, and also how it can be related to different phases in the evolution of the human-computer interaction field itself. In this context, we are able to account for the recent interest in activity theory as a possible alternative framework for HCI work, while stressing the need for HCI research and design to consider each of the separate, but related, levels.”
“Making sense of a body of data is a common activity in any kind of analysis. Sensemaking is the process of searching for a representation and encoding data in that representation to answer task-specific questions. Different operations during sensemaking require different cognitive and external resources. Representations are chosen and changed to reduce the cost of operations in an information processing task. The power of these representational shifts is generally under-appreciated as is the relation between sensemaking and information retrieval. We analyze sensemaking tasks and develop a model of the cost structure of sensemaking. We discuss implications for the integrated design of user interfaces, representational tools, and information retrieval systems.”
“Turvy is a simulated prototype of an instructible agent. The user teaches it by demonstrating actions and pointing at or talking about relevant data. We formalized our assumptions about what could be implemented, then used the Wizard of Oz to flesh out a design and observe users' reactions as they taught several editing tasks. We found: a) all users invent a similar set of commands to teach the agent; b) users learn the agent's language by copying its speech; c) users teach simple tasks with ease and complex ones with reasonable effort; and d) agents cannot expect users to point to or identify critical features without prompting. In conducting this rather complex simulation, we learned some lessons about using the Wizard of Oz to prototype intelligent agents: a) design of the simulation benefits greatly from prior implementation experience; b) the agent's behavior and dialog capabilities must be based on formal models; c) studies of verbal discourse lead directly to an implementable system; d) the designer benefits greatly by becoming the Wizard; and e) qualitative data is more valuable for answering global concerns, while quantitative data validates accounts and answers fine-grained questions.”
“A grid-based technique to specify simple number independent layouts by example is described. This technique was originally developed to support layout specification for a parallel program visualization system but can be applied to aid other simple graphical layout tasks as well. The technique works by allowing the user to construct an example layout using a grid-based interaction technique. This example can then be generalized into a layout algorithm which can be applied to create layouts of any size. However, rather than simply choosing the "best" generalization, the system described here takes a synergistic approach. New examples from a set of alternative generalizations are presented to the user so that they can guide and control the generalization process. This provides more understanding and control of the generalization process and typically allows a correct generalization to be constructed from only one small example.”
“Marquise is a new interactive tool that allows virtually all of the user interfaces of graphical editors to be created by demonstration without programming. A "graphical editor" allows the user to create and manipulate graphical objects with a mouse. This is a very large class of programs and includes drawing programs like MacDraw, graph layout editors like MacProject, visual language editors, and many CAD/CAM programs. The primary innovation in Marquise is to allow the designer to demonstrate the overall behavior of the interface. To implement this, the Marquise framework contains knowledge about palettes for creating and specifying properties of objects, and about operations such as selecting, moving, and deleting objects. The interactive tool uses the framework to allow the designer to demonstrate most of the end user's actions without programming, which means that Marquise can be used by non-programmers.”
“Even for the programmer, computer software can be a mysterious black box. But what if the programmer were able to give the box a good shake and listen to things rattle inside? Are there tools like the doctor's stethoscope that can help programmers listen to the heartbeat of their software? These are the kinds of questions we decided to explore by building LogoMedia, a sound-enhanced programming environment. LogoMedia supports the ability to associate non-speech audio with program events while the code is being developed. These associations cause subsequent test runs of the program to generate and manipulate sounds which can aid in the comprehension and analysis of the program's behavior.”
“An adaptive user interface relies, to a large extent, upon an adequate user model (e.g., a representation of user-expertise). However, building a user model may be a tedious and time consuming task that will render such an interface unattractive to developers. We thus need an effective means of inferring the user model at low cost. In this paper, we describe a technique for automatically inferring a fine-grain model of a user's knowledge state based on a small number of observations. With this approach, the domain of knowledge to be evaluated is represented as a network of nodes (knowledge units -- KU) and links (implications) induced from empirical user profiles. The user knowledge state is specified as a set of weights attached to the knowledge units that indicate the likelihood of mastery. These weights are updated every time a knowledge unit is reassigned a new weight (e.g., by a question-and-answer process). The updating scheme is based on the Dempster-Shafer algorithm. A User Knowledge Assessment Tool (UKAT) that employs this technique has been implemented. By way of simulations, we explore an entropy-based method of choosing questions, and compare the results with a random sampling method. The experimental results show that the proposed knowledge assessment and questioning methods are useful and efficient in inferring detailed models of user-expertise, but the entropy-based method can induce a bias in some circumstances.”
“An experimental 3D interface is described, including rendering acceleration hardware, a 3D mouse, and 3D interaction techniques. A 3D cursor, controlled by the augmented mouse, allows direct manipulation of 3D objects. Objects are selected by placing the tip of the cursor inside. Objects can be moved in 3D, or simultaneously moved and rotated using a technique called "tail-dragging." A method called "snap-to" helps users align objects. The interface is designed without using explicit modes or commands. Sounds accentuate the interaction. Details of the implementation and informal user observations are described, as well as topics for future work.”
“This paper presents an investigation of interactive worksystem planning in the multiple task work domain of medical reception. In an observational study of a medical reception worksystem, three different types of plan were identified: the task plan, the procedure plan and the activity plan. These three types of plan were required for effective working in the domain of medical reception, because of the many similar concurrent tasks, the frequency of behaviour switching between tasks and the need for consistency within the worksystem. It is proposed, therefore, that to design effective interactive human-computer worksystems for the domain of medical reception (and possibly for other work domains of a similar nature), the designer must specify the three different types of plan and the relationships between them. The three types of plan in medical reception are discussed in the context of design issues such as the allocation of planning structures.”
“Methods for studying user behavior in HCI can be informally divided into two approaches: experimental psychology in the laboratory and observations in the workplace. The first approach has been faulted for providing results that have little effect on system usability, while the second can often be accused of yielding primarily anecdotal data that do not support general conclusions. This paper describes two similar approaches in another field, the study of animal behavior, and shows how they produce complementary results. To support similar complementary interactions between research approaches in the HCI field, the paper describes the diary study technique, a tool for research in the workplace that achieves a relatively high standard of objectivity. A diary study is reported that focuses on exploratory learning.”
“Studies of video as a support for collaborative work have provided little hard evidence of its utility for either task performance or fostering telepresence, i.e. the conveyance of a face-to-face like social presence for remotely located participants. To date, most research on the value of video has concentrated on "talking heads" video in which the video images are of remote participants conferring or performing some task together. In contrast to talking heads video, we studied video-as-data in which video images of the workspace and work objects are the focus of interest, and convey critical information about the work. The use of video-as-data is intended to enhance task performance, rather than to provide telepresence. We studied the use of video during neurosurgery within the operating room and at remote locations away from the operating room. The workspace shown in the video is the surgical field (brain or spine) that the surgeon is operating on. We discuss our findings on the use of live and recorded video, and suggest extensions to video-as-data including its integration with computerized time-based information sources to educate and co-ordinate complex actions among distributed workgroups.”
“Media spaces support collaboration, but the limited access they provide to remote colleagues' activities can undermine their utility. To address this limitation, we built an experimental system in which four switchable cameras were deployed in each of two remote offices, and observed participants using the system to collaborate on two tasks. The new views allowed increased access to task-related artifacts; indeed, users preferred these views to more typical "face-to-face" ones. However, problems of establishing a joint frame of reference were exacerbated by the additional complexity, leading us to speculate about more effective ways to expand access to remote sites.”
“To successfully build bridges between worlds, user interface designers must increase their awareness of cross cultural differences, and make changes to the traditional software development process. Creating fluent interfaces for international markets goes beyond translating text and date, time, and number formats. This paper presents and explains a cross-cultural checklist of issues including text, local formats, images, symbols, colors, flow, and product functionality. Suggestions for an effective international product development cycle are provided. The suggested development cycle incorporates international design feedback and usability testing before the initial product is released.”
“The graphical user interface (GUI) typically provides a multi-windowed environment within a flat workspace or "desktop." Simultaneously, however, controls for executing commands within this interface are increasingly being rendered three-dimensionally. This paper explores ways in which the space of the GUI desktop might be literally and figuratively deepened through the incorporation of visual devices that have emerged during the history of art -- specifically, perspective and light effects. By enriching the visual vocabulary of the GUI, greater semantic complexity becomes sustainable.”
“Magicians have been designing and presenting illusions for 5000 years. They have developed principles, techniques and ethical positions for their craft that this paper argues are applicable to the design of human/computer interfaces. The author presents a number of specific examples from magic and discusses their counterparts in human interface design, in hopes that human interface practitioners and researchers will, having recognized the applicability of magic, go further on their own to explore its domain.”
“The defining characteristics of what we call "Fish Tank Virtual Reality" are a stereo image of a three dimensional (3D) scene viewed on a monitor using a perspective projection coupled to the head position of the observer. We discuss some of the relative merits of this mode of viewing as compared to head mounted stereo displays. In addition, we report the experimental investigation of the following variables: 1) whether or not the perspective view is coupled to the actual viewpoint of the observer, 2) whether stereopsis is employed. Experiment 1 involved the subjective comparison of pairs of viewing conditions and the results suggest that head coupling may be more important than stereo in yielding a strong impression of three dimensionality. Experiment 2 involved subjects tracing a path from a leaf of a 3D tree to the correct root (there were two trees intermeshed). The error rates ranged from 22% in the pictorial display, to 1.3% in the head coupled stereo display. The error rates for stereo alone and head coupling alone were 14.7% and 3.2% respectively. We conclude that head coupling is probably more important than stereo in 3D visualization and that head coupling and stereo combined provide an important enhancement to monitor based computer graphics.”
“In a distributed shared synthetic environment with provisions for high quality 3D visualization and interaction, it is possible to implement a powerful variant of a rooms/space metaphor based on the concept of presence or proximity between participants in 3D space. This kind of model can be used as an interface between the user and the computer, for overview and control of applications, file systems, networks and other computer resources, as well as for communication and collaboration with other users in the networked environment. We model proximity with a geometric volume of the immediate surroundings, the aura, of the participant's representation in the synthetic environment. This proximity, or aura, is used to establish presence at meetings, to establish communication channels and to provide interaction.”
“People use computers to accomplish tasks. Consequently, understanding human capabilities and tasks is as important to the design of computer systems as understanding computer technologies. The School of Computer Science (SCS) at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) has become home to an interdisciplinary community that performs research on HCI issues, develops systems using HCI methods of design and evaluation, and trains students in the theory and skills necessary to become HCI professionals.”
“Since its invention millenia ago, paper has served as one of our primary communications media. Its inherent physical properties make it easy to use, transport, and store, and cheap to manufacture. Despite these advantages, paper remains a second class citizen in the electronic world. In this paper, we present a new technology for bridging the paper and the electronic worlds. In the new technology, the user interface moves beyond the workstation and onto paper itself. We describe paper user interface technology and its implementation in a particular system called XAX.”
“With the advance of computer graphics hardware and computer communication technology it is now possible to build personal interactive 3D interfaces. Our research goal is to use this technology to create CSCW environments. There are several problems with existing CSCW applications and environments. We specifically address three intimately connected problem areas: * awareness (what are other users doing?) * focus (where is my attention directed?) * interaction metaphors (how do I do something?) Our approach is to let each user be represented by a 3D icon ("body icon" and graphically model the user's input devices in 3D space. Users navigate between applications in 3D space and can meet and collaborate in the environment. There is a direct correspondence between a user's body icon, input devices and the actions taken by the user. We claim that this gives users a more detailed and natural understanding of other users activities than in conventional CSCW systems. By using direct (real world) metaphors in the interaction with applications, it is our hope that the cognitive load on the users is reduced and the awareness and focus effects are increased.”
“When writing or reading on paper, we usually have a robust perception of the text as a spatial object with inherent structure. By a quick visual inspection of a book in our hands, and by flipping the pages for a few seconds, we get a preliminary feel for the size, structure and content of the text material. Not only are we guided by those physical cues in the process of approaching a new text, they also enable us to remember the text by its appearance and spatial arrangement (see e.g. [2]). In contrast, during on-screen writing and reading with a word processor, users often lack a global perspective of the text. In fact, the use of word processors has been shown to cause problems for writers in reading and evaluating long documents on the screen. The word processor is usually used on a small screen, showing only a very restricted part of the text at a time. Moreover, when the user makes revisions or shifts position in the text, the location of the text relative to the screen window varies. This contributes to writers lacking an adequate "sense of the text" when writing a long document [1].”
“This 5-minute video describes the potential of automated design ('optimisation') and identifies associated difficulties which can be overcome by an interface allowing the designer to guide the automated design process. Within the context of electronic circuit design the video then shows a system, called CoCo, for the Control and Observation of Circuit Optimisation. Illustrations focus on graphical interfaces used for (a) describing the circuit, (b) describing the required performance and (c) the human guidance of the automated design of that circuit. Jargon has been suppressed so that workers in related fields can see the implications of the idea.”
“The accompanying videotape demonstrates a system for viewing large graphs [2]. It's one of many possible implementations of a general framework for graphical fisheye views that we have developed. The graph in the video represents direct routes between major cities in the United States. An obvious way to see more detail about an area is to zoom into the graph. However, as the user zooms into an area, less of the graph is visible so the global structure of the graph is lost. This becomes more acute as the user pans the zoomed image. An alternate way to browse the graph is to use the graphical fisheye view technique. In a fisheye view, the area of interest is shown with detail while the rest of the structure is shown with successively less detail [1].”
“A problem in developing large software systems is understanding the source code. This problem is difficult because of the volume of code. The listing for a moderately sized system with 100,000 lines, printed 50 lines per page, would run 2,000 pages. This video shows a new software tool, Seesoft, that applies scientific visualization techniques to visualizing code. The visualization approach is to represent files in a directory in columns and the source code lines as rows of colored pixels. The indentation and length of each row of pixels corresponds to the actual code. The color of each row of pixels is determined by a statistic such as the age, programmer, or type of line, that we obtain from the change management system. The visual impression is that of a miniature picture of the source code with the indentation showing the usual C controls structure and the color showing the spatial distribution of the statistic. A user may adjust the display using direct manipulation techniques to discover interesting patterns in the code. Software engineering concepts such as complexity and bug fix on fix density can be visualized. The main interest of this work to the human factors community is the use of graphical user interface for selecting and combining statistics from a database, the effective use of hundreds of colors to display a mass of data, and the reduction of the pint-and-click direct manipulation metaphor to just pointing, e.g. something of interest will occur where ever the mouse points to on the display.”
“Telemedicine is the practice of medicine over communication links. The physician being consulted and the patient are in two different locations. A first telepathology system has been developed by Corabi Telemetrics. It allows a pathologist to render a diagnosis by examining tissue samples or body fluids under a remotely located microscope.”
“Design Rationale emphasises working with explicit representations not only of possible design solutions, but also of the reasons and processes behind them. Although the arguments for using Design Rationale are compelling, there is still very little experience of supplying the current approaches in practice. To explore its use in a practical setting we have been collaborating with the Open University using QOC (Questions, Options, Criteria) to design hypermedia interfaces for presenting course material (currently text books, course notes, and videos). This video illustrates some of the ways in which we have used QOC to support our activities.”
“This video describes the development of the ARGOS (Augmented Reality through Graphic Overlays on Stereovideo) system, as a tool for enhancing human-telerobot interaction, and as a more general tool with applications in a variety of areas, including image enhancement, simulation, sensor fusion, and virtual reality.”
“The film shows how dialogue design and error correction strategies, informed by human factors research, can lead to the development of usable and profitable systems. It starts with a simulation of a truly conversational machine to show the level of performance necessary to compete with human recognition. Template matching recognition is clearly explained so that viewers can see how most devices actually work. The film then shows the Digital Equipment Corporation's DECvoice in a number of voice input and output scenarios which highlight typical design problems and solutions. It concludes with a set of guidelines which will help designers make reasoned decisions about when and how to use speech recognition and avoid the typical problems experienced by users. The film ends with an example of a system which, having been designed with the guidelines in mind, is usable, efficient, and practical within the constraints of contemporary technology.”
“This work is aimed at building a dialogue system in which natural language is the basic communication channel, but the computer is seen as an active agent that allows a multimedia type interaction. In this way the means of communication are amplified, with the possibility of referring to images and other texts. ALFRESCO is an interactive system for a user interested in frescoes. It runs on a SUN 4 connected to a videodisc unit and a touchscreen. The particular videodisc in use includes images about Fourteenth Century Italian frescoes and monuments. The system, beside understanding and using language, shows images and combines film sequences. Images are active in that the user may refer to items by combining pointing with the use of linguistic demonstratives; for example, the user can point to a detail of a fresco and say "can I see another painting representing this^ saint?" Also, the system's linguistic output includes buttons that allow the user to enter in an hypertextual modality. The dialog may cause zooming into details or changing the focus of attention into other frescoes. The overall aim is not only to provide information, but also to promote other masterpieces that may attract the user.”
“Hyperspeech is a speech-only hypermedia application that explores issues of speech user interfaces, navigation, and system architecture in a purely audio environment without a visual display. The system uses speech recognition input and synthetic speech feedback to aid in navigating through a database of digitally recorded speech segments.”
“We are developing a multimedia authoring system, called IMPACT [1]. It is not easy for non-professional users to get good quality motion pictures and to edit them, for instance, in order to create multimedia presentations that express their concepts. To make this kind of tasks feasible for everyone, image-recognition technology is applied. Visualization of the structure of motion pictures is also very important [2]. A couple of visualization technique are developed for time axis editing.”
“Microcosm is an open hypermedia system within which it is possible to make and follow links from one multimedia document to another. The open nature of the system gives rise to a number of difficult user interface issues which are demonstrated in the video.”
“Previous work has demonstrated the use of documents as user interfaces, in which static document elements, such as words and pictures, become user interface interaction elements, such as menus and buttons [Bier 90]. In this videotape, we demonstrate our extension of this concept to dynamic multimedia documents, allowing user interface designers to create multimedia documents and to specify dynamic interaction elements within them. This video was taped from the screen of a Sun Microsystems SPARCstation 2. The audio portions of the multimedia documents were recorded and played back using TiogaVoice and the Etherphone voice management system [Zellweger 88].”
“Graphical editing, like many applications facilitated by computers, often involves repetitive tasks. To reduce repetition, programmers can write procedures to automate these tasks, however most users do not know how to program, and the repetitive tasks that they perform are frequently too specialized for the application programmer to anticipate. End users would benefit from the ability to customize and extend their applications for the tasks they usually perform. Programming by example systems and demonstrational interfaces aim to give end users this capability. Such systems are programmed simply by using the applications, rather than through an ancillary extension language. Innovative systems such as Pygmalion, Tinker, SmallStar, Peridot, Metamouse, and Eager have all explored ways of bringing more power to the non-programming end user [1]. The accompanying videotape demonstrates Chimera, a system built to explore new demonstrational techniques in the domains of graphical editing and interface building.”
“Integrated user support environments are individual and cooperative-work systems which allow their users to perform a large quantity of their daily work on-line, and which do so by providing access to a comprehensive set of tools that interact smoothly with each other and present a uniform interface to the users. The INtegrated User-Support Environments (IN-USE) Group is developing a framework for facilitating construction of such systems. The framework is oriented toward assisting users who must timeshare between multiple, highly information-intensive data analysis and problem solving tasks. Our fundamental goals are to help developers quickly assemble support environments that offer reasonable default appearance and behavior, and to make it easy to then customize those environments as needed.”
“The video demonstrates how a user can program Triggers to automate the wrapping of a properly sized rounded rectangle around a preexisting text field in an unmodified copy of MacDraw II. MacDraw II conveniently places a gray bounding box around a selected field. Pixel pattern searches using pieces of this bounding box as the pattern give enough data access to determine the size and location of the text field. Triggers then simulates a series of keystrokes and mouse actions that create the rounded rectangle. Other examples from graphic and text domains are briefly shown.”
“Graphical constraints define relations among graphical objects that must be maintained by an underlying system. The automatic maintenance of these relations has become important in increasing the functionality of graphical editors and user interface builders. Yet this increase in functionality has also brought the users of these tools the difficult task of specifying the constraints -- generally by writing mathematical equations that define the relations which must hold. The purpose of Rockit [2] is to identify the possible graphical constraints between objects in a scene and allow the user to quickly and easily choose and apply the desired constraints. Rockit is embedded in a graphical editor that allows the creation of application objects by direct manipulation. The user creates graphical objects and applies constraints to them. Typical objects include diagrams, circuits, flowcharts, and also standard application widgets. The supported constraints include connectors, aligners, and spacers. In this videotape, we illustrate our system through the construction of a slider.”
“Tourmaline is a system that simplifies the formatting of complicated headings and captions in a WYSIWYG word processor. The style systems of typical commercial word processors, although very useful, are too limited when a user needs to format items such as paper headings, which may contain many different styles within a single heading. The style systems of some batch oriented systems give the user more power by providing macro facilities to automatically format text, but these systems are extremely difficult to learn and use. Tourmaline uses demonstrational techniques [2] to combine the ease-of-use of WYSIWYG with the power of batch oriented text formatters. The system allows users to define macrostyles by example. A macrostyle is an abstract representation of a text object that allows different parts of the object to have completely different formatting attributes.”
“The Active Badge is used to provide information about where people are [Want et al. 1992, Want and Hopper 1992. It is battery powered, transmits in the infra-red spectrum and is approximately 60x60x8 millimetres. The transmissions take place every 15 seconds and identify the badge. Receivers are linked by wire to a computer and are placed so as to define cells for the coverage required. Normally they correspond to spaces occupied by one or a number of people. The badge has a light-dependent resistor used to reduce power consumption by decreasing the frequency of transmissions when in the dark. This also means that the user can switch the badge off by placing it in a pocket or face down on the table. Not all badge transmissions are picked up by a receiver, but by using simple algorithms in the receiving software the system can be made sufficiently accurate to be very useful. As well as transmitting the Active Badge can receive which makes possible a more secure system by using a one-way authentication function. Two buttons, two visible LEDs and a tone generator are available for simple interactions. Reciprocity of use is ensured by making badge information available to all computer screens in the organisation.”
“IMAGINE is a vision of health care in the year 1997 augmented by a variety of integrated information technologies. The film is not a literal prediction, but rather a projection of where current technologies are headed and what changes they will produce in the fields of medical diagnosis, patient care and hospital administration. Though produced at Hewlett-Packard, IMAGINE represents the capabilities of many companies and is a demonstration of open systems and their integration. The film's three scenarios highlight a range of situations. All pose problems in patient treatment or cost control, and in each it is information, delivered when and where it's needed, that provides the solutions. All of the medical procedures, information presentations, and interaction techniques were reviewed by experts in the fields concerned. Cardiologists, neurologists, pathologists, nurses and administrators provided abundant critical review to ensure accuracy. While this process was time consuming for such a fast paced film, it was felt to be essential for acceptance by the medical community.”
“Analysis of interaction between users and a system, based on video-assisted observation, can provide a highly informative and effective means of evaluating usability. To obtain valid and reliable results, the people observed should be representative users performing representative work tasks in appropriate circumstances, and the analysis should be methodical. The MUSiC Performance Measurement Method (PMM) -- developed at NPL as part of the ESPRIT Project MUSiC: Metrics for Usability Standards in Computing -- provides a validated method for making and analysing such video recordings to derive performance-based usability metrics. PMM is supported by the DRUM software tool which greatly speeds up analysis of video, and helps manage evaluations.”
“ADEPI is a novel design environment for prototyping user interfaces which allows the designer to construct an explicit model of the tasks that the user and computer will perform jointly. ADEPI incorporates task and user modelling components with a rapid prototyping user interface design tool to provide a user-task centred design environment.”
“This panel brings together usability professionals throughout the computer industry to demonstrate and discuss their usability lab software tools. These tools are specifically designed to improve the data collection and analysis process for usability labs. Their capabilities range from simple to complex and the panel will not only discuss the benefits of using the tools but also share the lessons learned during the design and development process.”
“Algorithm animations are dynamic graphical illustrations of computer algorithms, and they are used as teaching aids to help explain how the algorithms work. Although many people believe that algorithm animations are useful this way, no empirical evidence has ever been presented supporting this belief. We have conducted an empirical study of a priority queue algorithm animation, and the study's results indicate that the animation only slightly assisted student understanding. In this article, we analyze those results and hypothesize why algorithm animations may not be as helpful as was initially hoped. We also develop guidelines for making algorithm animations.”
“A software tool called EXPLAINER has been developed for helping programmers perform new tasks by exploring previously worked-out examples. EXPLAINER is based on cognitive principles of learning from examples and problem solving by analogy. The interface is based on the principle of making examples accessible through multiple presentation views and multiple representation perspectives. Empirical evaluation has shown that programmers using EXPLAINER exhibit less variability in their performance compared to programmers using a commercially available, searchable on-line manual. These results are related to other studies of programmers and to current methodologies in software engineering.”
“In order to inform the design of technology support and new procedural methods for software design, we analyzed the content of real design meetings in three organizations, focusing in particular on the questions the designers ask of each other. We found that most questions concerned the project requirements, particularly what the software was supposed to do and, somewhat less frequently, scenarios of use. Questions about functions to be performed by software components and how these functions were to be realized were also fairly frequent. Rationales for design decisions were seldom asked about. The implications of this research for design tools and methods are discussed.”
“This paper presents five abstract characteristics of the mental representation of computer programs: hierarchical structure, explicit mapping of code to goals, foundation on recognition of recurring patterns, connection of knowledge, and grounding in the program text. An experiment is reported in which expert and novice programmers studied a Pascal program for comprehension and then answered a series of questions about it designed to show these characteristics if they existed in the mental representations formed. Evidence for all of the abstract characteristics was found in the mental representations of expert programmers. Novices' representations generally lacked the characteristics, but there was evidence that they had the beginnings, although poorly developed, of such characteristics.”
“One of the attractive features of keyboards is that they support novice as well as expert users. Novice users enter text using "hunt-and-peck," experts use touch-typing. Although it takes time to learn touch-typing, there is a large payoff in faster operation. In contrast to keyboards, pen-based computers have only a novice mode for text entry in which users print text to a character recognizer. An electronic pen (or stylus) would be more attractive as an input device if it supported expert users with some analogue of touch-typing. We present the design and preliminary analysis of an approach to stylus touch-typing using an alphabet of unistrokes, which are letters specially designed to be used with a stylus. Unistrokes have the following advantages over ordinary printing: they are faster to write, less prone to recognition error, and can be entered in an "eyes-free" manner that requires very little screen real estate.”
“Half-QWERTY is a new one-handed typing technique, designed to facilitate the transfer of two-handed typing skill to the one-handed condition. It is performed on a standard keyboard, or a special half keyboard (with full-sized keys). In an experiment using touch typists, hunt-and-peck typing speeds were surpassed after 3-4 hours of practice. Subjects reached 50% of their two-handed typing speed after about 8 hours. After 10 hours, all subjects typed between 41% and 73% of their two-handed speed, ranging from 23.8 to 42.8 wpm. These results are important in providing access to disabled users, and for the design of compact computers. They also bring into question previous research claiming finger actions of one hand map to the other via spatial congruence rather than mirror image.”
“Diagram editing is an attractive application of gestural interfaces and pen-based computers which promise a new input paradigm where users communicate with computers in diagram languages by using gestures. A key problem in building gesture-based diagram editors is the recognition of handsketched diagrams. Existing approaches concentrate either on gesture recognition or on parsing visual languages, there has been a lack of integrated recognition concepts. This paper presents novel concepts and techniques based on an incremental paradigm of gesture recognition and a cooperative communication between modules for pattern recognition and for diagram parsing. These concepts and techniques have been used successfully to build several experimental gesture-based and syntax-directed diagram editors.”
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URL: http://www.interaction-design.org/references/conferences/proceedings_of_the_acm_chi_93_human_factors_in_computing_systems_conference.html
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Mar 18th, 2010
