User emotional interaction processor: a tool to support the development of GUIs through physiological user monitoring

Ever since computers have entered humans' daily lives, the activity between the human and the digital ecosystems has increased. This increase encourages the development of smarter and more user-friendly human-computer interfaces. However, to test these interfaces, the means of interaction have been limited, for the most part restricted to the conventional interface, the "manual" interface, where physical input is required, where participants who test these interfaces use a keyboard, mouse, or a touch screen, and where communication between participants and designers is required. There is another method, which will be applied in this dissertation, which does not require physical input from the participants, which is called Affective Computing. This dissertation presents the development of a tool to support the development of graphical interfaces, based on the monitoring of psychological and physiological aspects of the user (emotions and attention), aiming to improve the experience of the end user, with the ultimate goal of improving the interface design. The development of this tool will be described. The results, provided by designers from an IT company, suggest that the tool is useful but that the optimized interface generated by it still has some flaws. These flaws are mainly related to the lack of consideration of a general context in the interface generation process.Desde que os computadores entraram na vida diária dos humanos, a atividade entre o ecossistema humano e o digital tem aumentado. Este aumento estimula o desenvolvimento de interfaces humano-computador mais inteligentes e apelativas ao utilizador. No entanto, para testar estas interfaces, os meios de interação têm sido limitados, em grande parte restritos à interface convencional, a interface "manual", onde é preciso "input" físico, onde os participantes que testam estas interface, usam um teclado, um rato ou um "touch screen", e onde a comunicação dos participantes com os designers é necessária. Existe outro método, que será aplicado nesta dissertação, que não necessita de "input" físico dos participantes, que se denomina de "Affective Computing". Esta dissertação apresenta o desenvolvimento de uma ferramenta de suporte ao desenvolvimento de interfaces gráficas, baseada na monitorização de aspetos psicológicos e fisiológicos do utilizador (emoções e atenção), visando melhorar a experiência do utilizador final, com o objetivo último de melhorar o design da interface. O desenvolvimento desta ferramenta será descrito. Os resultados, dados por designers de uma empresa de IT, sugerem que esta é útil, mas que a interface otimizada gerada pela mesma tem ainda algumas falhas. Estas falhas estão, principalmente, relacionadas com a ausência de consideração de um contexto geral no processo de geração da interface

Using natural user interfaces to support synchronous distributed collaborative work

Synchronous Distributed Collaborative Work (SDCW) occurs when group members work together at the same time from different places together to achieve a common goal. Effective SDCW requires good communication, continuous coordination and shared information among group members. SDCW is possible because of groupware, a class of computer software systems that supports group work. Shared-workspace groupware systems are systems that provide a common workspace that aims to replicate aspects of a physical workspace that is shared among group members in a co-located environment. Shared-workspace groupware systems have failed to provide the same degree of coordination and awareness among distributed group members that exists in co-located groups owing to unintuitive interaction techniques that these systems have incorporated. Natural User Interfaces (NUIs) focus on reusing natural human abilities such as touch, speech, gestures and proximity awareness to allow intuitive human-computer interaction. These interaction techniques could provide solutions to the existing issues of groupware systems by breaking down the barrier between people and technology created by the interaction techniques currently utilised. The aim of this research was to investigate how NUI interaction techniques could be used to effectively support SDCW. An architecture for such a shared-workspace groupware system was proposed and a prototype, called GroupAware, was designed and developed based on this architecture. GroupAware allows multiple users from distributed locations to simultaneously view and annotate text documents, and create graphic designs in a shared workspace. Documents are represented as visual objects that can be manipulated through touch gestures. Group coordination and awareness is maintained through document updates via immediate workspace synchronization, user action tracking via user labels and user availability identification via basic proxemic interaction. Members can effectively communicate via audio and video conferencing. A user study was conducted to evaluate GroupAware and determine whether NUI interaction techniques effectively supported SDCW. Ten groups of three members each participated in the study. High levels of performance, user satisfaction and collaboration demonstrated that GroupAware was an effective groupware system that was easy to learn and use, and effectively supported group work in terms of communication, coordination and information sharing. Participants gave highly positive comments about the system that further supported the results. The successful implementation of GroupAware and the positive results obtained from the user evaluation provides evidence that NUI interaction techniques can effectively support SDCW