Designing for User Confidence in Intelligent Environments

Intelligent environments aim at supporting and assisting users in their daily activities. Their reliability, i.e., the capability of correctly accomplishing the intended tasks and of limiting or avoiding damage in case of malfunctions, is essential as for any user-facing technology. One aspect of reliability, often neglected, is guaranteeing the consistency between system operation and user expectations, so that users may build confidence over the correct behavior of the system and its reaction to their actions. The paper will review the literature concerning methodologies and tools that directly involve users and have been specifically applied or adopted for intelligent environments, throughout the entire design flow – from requirements gathering to interface design. The paper will then propose, building on top of the previous analysis, a set of guidelines that system designers should follow to ensure user confidence in their intelligent environments

The Nature of Wayfinding in the City: Waikiki

The focus of this study on the nature of wayfinding may reveal multiple unknown points in the terrain one traverses. This thesis entails a quasi-objective approach that enables a creative way of analyzing, synthesizing, and discovering these points of unknown desire and destination. For example, surveying the tourists and travelers to Waikiki may reveal the multiplicity of points that embed themselves in the urban landscape. Yet, these spatial points reveal themselves through the act of traversing, finding, discovering, and encountering along the way. In addition, the study reveals the spatial matrix in which points of desire and destination manifest for the visitor, a multiplicity of points with instances of departure and arrival. The visitor demographic can be a “lens” from which to understand how one uses wayfinding tools and finds their points of desire in the terrain. For instance, how do we as tourists and travelers find our way? Also, how do we traverse toward a given destination? Indeed, most travelers and tourists are using visual, auditory, and tactile cues to find their way. Yet, do these spatial signifiers of meaning help them find their destination or are they getting them lost? Focusing on Waikiki as a destination and site for this study will give insight into the phenomena of wayfinding, which influences the perception of the user while traversing a given terrain within a spatial matrix of desire. methodology The strategies and tactics that I will employ will be a combination of empirical and quasi-objective approaches, such as collecting evidence, taking photos, surveying tourists and travelers, and creating experiential maps from the site. This is my way of studying wayfinding, from the 6 evidence collected (brochures, maps, ephemeral artifacts) how does one find their point of desire in waikiki? what are the instruments of finding destinations in waikiki? what are the modes of traversing waikiki’s terrain? interpretive mappings and site photography surveying tourists and tourist mappings 1 2 3 triangulation empirical study (Experiential + interpretive) GRAPHIC A: TRIANGULATION OF COLLECTED EVIDENCE A I ABSTRACT 7 totally rigorous and scientific, to the subjective of scope. This will attempt to synthesize an understanding of how one wayfinds in urban environments with multiple points of destination. For example, in figure A, this method entails triangulating the surveys of the travelers and tourists, collecting evidence, such as maps and brochures, and creating interpretive mappings of Waikiki, to reveal and represent the spatial matrix of points as it relates to wayfinding. These tactics will help create experiential mappings, which can uncover information about the terrain of Waikiki that is unknown to travelers and tourists, advancing the notion that the urban terrain is multiple in response to the user’s ability to traverse, find, and encounter spatial points of desire and destination. goals One of the goals of this study will be to understand how one finds their way in dense urban environments, such as cities by using a variety of visual, tactile, and auditory signs. These signs come from the built and natural landscape as well as digital mobile devices of wayfinding. Yet, another goal would be to investigate the spatial matrix that embeds points of destination and desire for the visitors to experience and discover. For example, Waikiki is a destination for many travelers and tourists, thus manifesting points of desire, which are explicit, implicit, impulsive, and interstitial. The visitors traverse a spatial matrix of points, which is multiple and forms a network of pathways and nodal interactions. Indeed, maps and brochures afford the traveler and tourist the ability to traverse the terrain and find their destination or point of desire. Thus, allowing for spontaneity and discovery to manifest within the terrain, where one traverses and encounters spatial points, along the way, creating meaningful instances in space and time. theory These dense urban terrains create a need for wayfinding to occur because they contain spatial matrices of destination and desire. A complex system of built form and semantics is embedded in the DNA of the urban plan. Most urban spaces interconnect to each other and weave a network of circulation towards multiple points of desire. Each point can inform the experience and memory of the traveler or tourist while traversing, which influences how they map and perceive their terrain. This densification of the urban environment curtails users perception while traversing the terrain at different velocities, influencing the way these points of destination are found, made, and forgotten. Moreover, these systems of human movement along pedestrian and vehicular pathways, in the urban framework, create multiple spatial matrices of desirable points that layer within trajectories in the terrain

Personal Wayfinding Assistance

We are traveling many different routes every day. In familiar environments it is easy for us to find our ways. We know our way from bedroom to kitchen, from home to work, from parking place to office, and back home at the end of the working day. We have learned these routes in the past and are now able to find our destination without having to think about it. As soon as we want to find a place beyond the demarcations of our mental map, we need help. In some cases we ask our friends to explain us the way, in other cases we use a map to find out about the place. Mobile phones are increasingly equipped with wayfinding assistance. These devices are usually at hand because they are handy and small, which enables us to get wayfinding assistance everywhere where we need it. While the small size of mobile phones makes them handy, it is a disadvantage for displaying maps. Geographic information requires space to be visualized in order to be understandable. Typically, not all information displayed in maps is necessary. An example are walking ways in parks for car drivers, they are they are usually no relevant route options. By not displaying irrelevant information, it is possible to compress the map without losing important information. To reduce information purposefully, we need information about the user, the task at hand, and the environment it is embedded in. In this cumulative dissertation, I describe an approach that utilizes the prior knowledge of the user to adapt maps to the to the limited display options of mobile devices with small displays. I focus on central questions that occur during wayfinding and relate them to the knowledge of the user. This enables the generation of personal and context-specific wayfinding assistance in the form of maps which are optimized for small displays. To achieve personalized assistance, I present algorithmic methods to derive spatial user profiles from trajectory data. The individual profiles contain information about the places users regularly visit, as well as the traveled routes between them. By means of these profiles it is possible to generate personalized maps for partially familiar environments. Only the unfamiliar parts of the environment are presented in detail, the familiar parts are highly simplified. This bears great potential to minimize the maps, while at the same time preserving the understandability by including personally meaningful places as references. To ensure the understandability of personalized maps, we have to make sure that the names of the places are adapted to users. In this thesis, we study the naming of places and analyze the potential to automatically select and generate place names. However, personalized maps only work for environments the users are partially familiar with. If users need assistance for unfamiliar environments, they require complete information. In this thesis, I further present approaches to support uses in typical situations which can occur during wayfinding. I present solutions to communicate context information and survey knowledge along the route, as well as methods to support self-localization in case orientation is lost

Cross-display attention switching in mobile interaction with large displays

Mobile devices equipped with features (e.g., camera, network connectivity and media player) are increasingly being used for different tasks such as web browsing, document reading and photography. While the portability of mobile devices makes them desirable for pervasive access to information, their small screen real-estate often imposes restrictions on the amount of information that can be displayed and manipulated on them. On the other hand, large displays have become commonplace in many outdoor as well as indoor environments. While they provide an efficient way of presenting and disseminating information, they provide little support for digital interactivity or physical accessibility. Researchers argue that mobile phones provide an efficient and portable way of interacting with large displays, and the latter can overcome the limitations of the small screens of mobile devices by providing a larger presentation and interaction space. However, distributing user interface (UI) elements across a mobile device and a large display can cause switching of visual attention and that may affect task performance. This thesis specifically explores how the switching of visual attention across a handheld mobile device and a vertical large display can affect a single user's task performance during mobile interaction with large displays. It introduces a taxonomy based on the factors associated with the visual arrangement of Multi Display User Interfaces (MDUIs) that can influence visual attention switching during interaction with MDUIs. It presents an empirical analysis of the effects of different distributions of input and output across mobile and large displays on the user's task performance, subjective workload and preference in the multiple-widget selection task, and in visual search tasks with maps, texts and photos. Experimental results show that the selection of multiple widgets replicated on the mobile device as well as on the large display, versus those shown only on the large display, is faster despite the cost of initial attention switching in the former. On the other hand, a hybrid UI configuration where the visual output is distributed across the mobile and large displays is the worst, or equivalent to the worst, configuration in all the visual search tasks. A mobile device-controlled large display configuration performs best in the map search task and equal to best (i.e., tied with a mobile-only configuration) in text- and photo-search tasks

Customizing smart environments: a tabletop approach

Smart environments are becoming a reality in our society and the number of intelligent devices integrated in these spaces is in-creasing very rapidly. As the combination of intelligent elements will open a wide range of new opportunities to make our lives easier, final users should be provided with a simplified method of handling complex intelligent features. Specifying behavior in these environments can be difficult for non-experts, so that more efforts should be directed towards easing the customization tasks. This work presents an entirely visual rule editor based on dataflow expressions for interactive tabletops which allows be-havior to be specified in smart environments. An experiment was carried out aimed at evaluating the usability of the editor in terms of non-programmers understanding of the abstractions and concepts involved in the rule model, ease of use of the pro-posed visual interface and the suitability of the interaction mechanisms implemented in the editing tool. The study revealed that users with no previous programming experience were able to master the proposed rule model and editing tool for specifying be-havior in the context of a smart home, even though some minor usability issues were detected.We would like to thank all the volunteers that participated in the empirical study. Our thanks are also due to the ASIC/Polimedia team for their computer hardware support. This work was partially funded by the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation under the National R&D&I Program within the project CreateWorlds (TIN2010-20488). It also received support from a postdoctoral fellowship within the VALi+d Program of the Conselleria d'Educacio, Cultura I Esport (Generalitat Valenciana) awarded to Alejandro Catala (APOSTD/2013/013). 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Ontology-based end-user visual query formulation: Why, what, who, how, and which?

Value creation in an organisation is a time-sensitive and data-intensive process, yet it is often delayed and bounded by the reliance on IT experts extracting data for domain experts. Hence, there is a need for providing people who are not professional developers with the flexibility to pose relatively complex and ad hoc queries in an easy and intuitive way. In this respect, visual methods for query formulation undertake the challenge of making querying independent of users’ technical skills and the knowledge of the underlying textual query language and the structure of data. An ontology is more promising than the logical schema of the underlying data for guiding users in formulating queries, since it provides a richer vocabulary closer to the users’ understanding. However, on the one hand, today the most of world’s enterprise data reside in relational databases rather than triple stores, and on the other, visual query formulation has become more compelling due to ever-increasing data size and complexity—known as Big Data. This article presents and argues for ontology-based visual query formulation for end-users; discusses its feasibility in terms of ontology-based data access, which virtualises legacy relational databases as RDF, and the dimensions of Big Data; presents key conceptual aspects and dimensions, challenges, and requirements; and reviews, categorises, and discusses notable approaches and systems