Overview Chapter 6: Interfaces and interactions

• Paradigm • Interfaces types • Which interface is best for a given application or activity

Paradigms • Refers to a particular approach that has been adopted by a community in terms of shared assumptions, concepts, values and practices – Questions to be asked and how they should be framed – Phenomena to be observed – How findings from experiments are to be analyzed and interpreted

Ubiquitous Computing • Any computing technology that permits human interaction away from a single workstation – filling the real world with computers

Paradigms in HCI • In 80s: – single user on the desktop

• In the mid 90s: – virtual reality, multimedia, agent interfaces, ubiquitous computing

New thinking • How to access and interact with information in any situation? • Designing user experiences • The right form to provide contextuallyrelevant information • Ensuring that information is secure and trustworthy

• What HCI is in this context?

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Interface types

Command interfaces

1980s interfaces Command, WIMP/GUI

1990s interfaces Advanced graphical (multimedia, virtual reality, information visualization) Web, Speech (voice), Pen, gesture, and touch Appliance

• Efficient, precise, and fast • Large overhead to learning set of commands

2000s interfaces Mobile, Multimodal, Shareable, Tangible Augmented and mixed reality Wearable, Robotic

WIMP/GUI interfaces • Windows • Icons • Menus • Pointing device

GUIs • Same basic building blocks as WIMPs but more varied – Color, 3Dsound, animation, – Many types of menus, icons, windows

• New graphical elements, e.g., – toolbars, docks, rollovers

Apple’s shrinking windows

Selecting a country from a scrolling window

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Research and design issues

Menus

• Window management • Attention and distraction

flat lists, drop-down, pop-up, contextual, and expanding ones, e.g., scrolling and cascading

• Design principles – spacing, grouping, and simplicity should be used

iPod flat menu structure

Cascading menu

Contextual menus

Research and design issues

• Provide access to often-used commands that make sense in the context of a current task

• What are best names/labels/phrases to use? • Placement in list is critical – Quit and save need to be far apart

• Many international guidelines

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Icon design

Simple icons

• easier to learn and remember • compact • populate

Simple icons plus labels

Icon forms • The mapping between the representation and underlying referent can be: – similar (e.g., a picture of a file to represent the object file), – analogical (e.g., a picture of a pair of scissors to represent ‘cut’) – arbitrary (e.g., the use of an X to represent ‘delete’)

Early icons

Newer icons

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Research and design issues • Do not have to draw or invent icons from scratch

Multimedia

Research and design issues • How to design multimedia to help users explore, keep track of, and integrate the multiple representations

Advanced graphical interfaces • Users can access, explore, and visualize information – e.g. interactive animations, multimedia, virtual environments, and visualizations

Virtual reality and virtual environments • Enabling users to interact with objects and navigate in 3D space • Create highly engaging user experiences

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Pros and cons • higher fidelity • sense of presence • Provides different viewpoints

Research and design issues • Good for training • Design issues – – – –

Level of fidelity Navigation Control and interaction Information

• Head-mounted displays are uncomfortable to wear, and can cause motion sickness and disorientation

Which is the most engaging game of Snake?

Mobile devices for special needs

Many mobile devices

Simple or complex phone for you and your grandmother?

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Mobile challenges

Have speech interfaces come of age?

• Small screens, small number of keys and restricted number of controls • Interaction design – Cognitive – ergonomics

• Usability vs preference

Spoken Utterance

Acoustic processor

Speaker Model

Feature analysis

ASR

Synthetic speech

Dictionary

Pattern matching process

Syntax

Get me a human operator! Text of the sentences

Language process

Language Models Task-specific words, phrases or sentences

• What is your experience of such systems? • Who shall take the control of the conversation? • Would you assume that the system is like a human?

Speech recognizer

Research and design issues • How to design systems that can keep conversation on track

Definitions of multimodality • Multimodality is the use of two or more of the six senses for the exchange of information (Granström, 2002)

• Type of voice actor

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Applications Mobile environment

Military systems

Personal devices

Complex industrial systems

Information services via telephone

Multi-modal vs. Multi-media • Multi-modal – Visual – Aural – Gesture –…

• Input/output interaction channel

• Multi-media – Video – Text – Animation – Still images, –…

Shareable interfaces • Shareable interfaces are designed for more than one person to use – multiple inputs – simultaneous input

A smartboard

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DiamondTouch Tabletop

Advantages • Can support flexible group working • Can be used by multiple users • Can support more equitable participation

Research and design issues • Multimodal interaction • Size, orientation, and shape of the display design • Horizontal surfaces vs vertical ones • Work efficiency

Urp

Tangible interfaces • sensor-based interaction • direct manipulation on a physical object/s and causes a digital effect • The effects can be in other media or place, even embedded in the physical object

Steve Mann - pioneer of wearables

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Research and design issues • Comfort

Robotic interfaces • Four types

• Hygiene • Ease of wear • Usability

Research and design issues • How do humans react to physical robots? • Should robots be designed to be human-like or robots-like? • Should simulate human-human interaction, or human-computer interaction?

Which interface? • Is multimedia better than tangible interfaces for learning? • Is speech as effective as a command-based interface? • Is a multimodal interface more effective than a monomodal interface? • Will wearable interfaces be better than mobile interfaces for helping people find information in foreign cities? • Are virtual environments the ultimate interface for playing games? • Will shareable interfaces be better at supporting communication and collaboration compared with using networked desktop PCs?

Which interface? • Will depend on task, users, context, cost, robustness, etc. • Technology development will have strong impact.

Summary • Many innovative interfaces have emerged post the WIMP/GUI era, including speech, wearable, mobile, and tangible • Many new design and research questions need to be considered to decide which one to use • Web interfaces are becoming more like multimedia-based interfaces • An important concern that underlies the design of any kind of interface is how information is represented to the user so they can carry out ongoing activity or task

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