Evaluation of an anthropomorphic user interface in a travel reservation context and affordances

This paper describes an experiment and its results concerning research that has been going on for a number ofyears in the area of anthropomorphic user interface feedback. The main aims of the research have been to examine theeffectiveness and user satisfaction of anthropomorphic feedback in various domains. The results are of use to all interactivesystems designers, particularly when dealing with issues of user interface feedback design. There is currently somedisagreement amongst computer scientists concerning the suitability of such types of feedback. This research is working toresolve this disagreement. The experiment detailed, concerns the specific software domain of Online Factual Delivery in thespecific context of online hotel bookings. Anthropomorphic feedback was compared against an equivalent non-anthropomorphicfeedback. Statistically significant results were obtained suggesting that the non-anthropomorphic feedback was more effective.The results for user satisfaction were however less clear. The results obtained are compared with previous research. Thissuggests that the observed results could be due to the issue of differing domains yielding different results. However the resultsmay also be due to the affordances at the interface being more facilitated in the non-anthropomorphic feedback

Advanced Knowledge Technologies at the Midterm: Tools and Methods for the Semantic Web

The University of Edinburgh and research sponsors are authorised to reproduce and distribute reprints and on-line copies for their purposes notwithstanding any copyright annotation hereon. The views and conclusions contained herein are the author’s and shouldn’t be interpreted as necessarily representing the official policies or endorsements, either expressed or implied, of other parties.In a celebrated essay on the new electronic media, Marshall McLuhan wrote in 1962:Our private senses are not closed systems but are endlessly translated into each other in that experience which we call consciousness. Our extended senses, tools, technologies, through the ages, have been closed systems incapable of interplay or collective awareness. Now, in the electric age, the very instantaneous nature of co-existence among our technological instruments has created a crisis quite new in human history. Our extended faculties and senses now constitute a single field of experience which demands that they become collectively conscious. Our technologies, like our private senses, now demand an interplay and ratio that makes rational co-existence possible. As long as our technologies were as slow as the wheel or the alphabet or money, the fact that they were separate, closed systems was socially and psychically supportable. This is not true now when sight and sound and movement are simultaneous and global in extent. (McLuhan 1962, p.5, emphasis in original)Over forty years later, the seamless interplay that McLuhan demanded between our technologies is still barely visible. McLuhan’s predictions of the spread, and increased importance, of electronic media have of course been borne out, and the worlds of business, science and knowledge storage and transfer have been revolutionised. Yet the integration of electronic systems as open systems remains in its infancy.Advanced Knowledge Technologies (AKT) aims to address this problem, to create a view of knowledge and its management across its lifecycle, to research and create the services and technologies that such unification will require. Half way through its sixyear span, the results are beginning to come through, and this paper will explore some of the services, technologies and methodologies that have been developed. We hope to give a sense in this paper of the potential for the next three years, to discuss the insights and lessons learnt in the first phase of the project, to articulate the challenges and issues that remain.The WWW provided the original context that made the AKT approach to knowledge management (KM) possible. AKT was initially proposed in 1999, it brought together an interdisciplinary consortium with the technological breadth and complementarity to create the conditions for a unified approach to knowledge across its lifecycle. The combination of this expertise, and the time and space afforded the consortium by the IRC structure, suggested the opportunity for a concerted effort to develop an approach to advanced knowledge technologies, based on the WWW as a basic infrastructure.The technological context of AKT altered for the better in the short period between the development of the proposal and the beginning of the project itself with the development of the semantic web (SW), which foresaw much more intelligent manipulation and querying of knowledge. The opportunities that the SW provided for e.g., more intelligent retrieval, put AKT in the centre of information technology innovation and knowledge management services; the AKT skill set would clearly be central for the exploitation of those opportunities.The SW, as an extension of the WWW, provides an interesting set of constraints to the knowledge management services AKT tries to provide. As a medium for the semantically-informed coordination of information, it has suggested a number of ways in which the objectives of AKT can be achieved, most obviously through the provision of knowledge management services delivered over the web as opposed to the creation and provision of technologies to manage knowledge.AKT is working on the assumption that many web services will be developed and provided for users. The KM problem in the near future will be one of deciding which services are needed and of coordinating them. Many of these services will be largely or entirely legacies of the WWW, and so the capabilities of the services will vary. As well as providing useful KM services in their own right, AKT will be aiming to exploit this opportunity, by reasoning over services, brokering between them, and providing essential meta-services for SW knowledge service management.Ontologies will be a crucial tool for the SW. The AKT consortium brings a lot of expertise on ontologies together, and ontologies were always going to be a key part of the strategy. All kinds of knowledge sharing and transfer activities will be mediated by ontologies, and ontology management will be an important enabling task. Different applications will need to cope with inconsistent ontologies, or with the problems that will follow the automatic creation of ontologies (e.g. merging of pre-existing ontologies to create a third). Ontology mapping, and the elimination of conflicts of reference, will be important tasks. All of these issues are discussed along with our proposed technologies.Similarly, specifications of tasks will be used for the deployment of knowledge services over the SW, but in general it cannot be expected that in the medium term there will be standards for task (or service) specifications. The brokering metaservices that are envisaged will have to deal with this heterogeneity.The emerging picture of the SW is one of great opportunity but it will not be a wellordered, certain or consistent environment. It will comprise many repositories of legacy data, outdated and inconsistent stores, and requirements for common understandings across divergent formalisms. There is clearly a role for standards to play to bring much of this context together; AKT is playing a significant role in these efforts. But standards take time to emerge, they take political power to enforce, and they have been known to stifle innovation (in the short term). AKT is keen to understand the balance between principled inference and statistical processing of web content. Logical inference on the Web is tough. Complex queries using traditional AI inference methods bring most distributed computer systems to their knees. Do we set up semantically well-behaved areas of the Web? Is any part of the Web in which semantic hygiene prevails interesting enough to reason in? These and many other questions need to be addressed if we are to provide effective knowledge technologies for our content on the web

GTA: Groupware task analysis Modeling complexity

The task analysis methods discussed in this presentation stem from Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) and Ethnography (as applied for the design of Computer Supported Cooperative Work CSCW), different disciplines that often are considered conflicting approaches when applied to the same design problems. Both approaches have their strength and weakness, and an integration of them does add value to the early stages of design of cooperation technology. In order to develop an integrated method for groupware task analysis (GTA) a conceptual framework is presented that allows a systematic perspective on complex work phenomena. The framework features a triple focus, considering (a) people, (b) work, and (c) the situation. Integrating various task-modeling approaches requires vehicles for making design information explicit, for which an object oriented formalism will be suggested. GTA consists of a method and framework that have been developed during practical design exercises. Examples from some of these cases will illustrate our approach

Collocating Interface Objects: Zooming into Maps

May, Dean and Barnard [10] used a theoretically based model to argue that objects in a wide range of interfaces should be collocated following screen changes such as a zoom-in to detail. Many existing online maps do not follow this principle, but move a clicked point to the centre of the subsequent display, leaving the user looking at an unrelated location. This paper presents three experiments showing that collocating the point clicked on a map so that the detailed location appears in the place previously occupied by the overview location makes the map easier to use, reducing eye movements and interaction duration. We discuss the benefit of basing design principles on theoretical models so that they can be applied to novel situations, and so designers can infer when to use and not use them

Evaluation of human-like anthropomorphism in the context of online bidding and affordances

This paper presents a four condition experiment and the results concerning the wider area of investigating the effectiveness and user satisfaction of using anthropomorphic feedback at the user interface. The specific context used was online bidding. The four conditions used in the experiment were human video, human voice, human voice with anthropomorphic text and a control consisting of neutral text. The main results of the experiment showed significant differences in participants' perceptions regarding the 'humanity' of the feedback they used. As expected, the control condition consisting of neutral text incurred significantly lower ratings for the 'humanity' characteristics of the feedback. The human video condition also incurred significantly stronger perceptions regarding the appearance being human. The results were also analysed in light of the theory of affordances and the authors conclude that the four conditions used in the experiment were likely equivalent in their facilitating the affordances. Therefore the authors suggest that facilitating the affordances may be more crucial to a user interface and the users than the actual anthropomorphic characteristic of the feedback used

The use of non-intrusive user logging to capture engineering rationale, knowledge and intent during the product life cycle

Within the context of Life Cycle Engineering it is important that structured engineering information and knowledge are captured at all phases of the product life cycle for future reference. This is especially the case for long life cycle projects which see a large number of engineering decisions made at the early to mid-stages of a product's life cycle that are needed to inform engineering decisions later on in the process. A key aspect of technology management will be the capturing of knowledge through out the product life cycle. Numerous attempts have been made to apply knowledge capture techniques to formalise engineering decision rationale and processes; however, these tend to be associated with substantial overheads on the engineer and the company through cognitive process interruptions and additional costs/time. Indeed, when life cycle deadlines come closer these capturing techniques are abandoned due the need to produce a final solution. This paper describes work carried out for non-intrusively capturing and formalising product life cycle knowledge by demonstrating the automated capture of engineering processes/rationale using user logging via an immersive virtual reality system for cable harness design and assembly planning. Associated post-experimental analyses are described which demonstrate the formalisation of structured design processes and decision representations in the form of IDEF diagrams and structured engineering change information. Potential future research directions involving more thorough logging of users are also outlined

Evaluation of anthropomorphic feedback for an online auction and affordances

This paper describes an experiment investigating the effectiveness and user satisfaction of using anthropomorphic feedback at the user interface. The context chosen was online bidding due to this kind of activity being very much used in current times by general users. The main results of the experiment were that there was a statistically significant effect observed for the time taken to place a bid in the anthropomorphic text condition. However there were no other significant effects for effectiveness issues and user satisfaction indicators. The results were also analysed in terms of the affordances and the main findings were that each of the four conditions tested in the experiment were probably equivalent in terms of their facilitating the affordances. Overall it may be more important to facilitate the affordances rather than a type of feedback being anthropomorphic in nature or not

Agents for educational games and simulations

This book consists mainly of revised papers that were presented at the Agents for Educational Games and Simulation (AEGS) workshop held on May 2, 2011, as part of the Autonomous Agents and MultiAgent Systems (AAMAS) conference in Taipei, Taiwan. The 12 full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from various submissions. The papers are organized topical sections on middleware applications, dialogues and learning, adaption and convergence, and agent applications

Using cognitive work analysis to explore activity allocation within military domains

Cognitive Work Analysis (CWA) is frequently advocated as an approach for the analysis of complex sociotechnical systems. Much of the current CWA literature within the military domain pays particular attention to its initial phases; Work Domain Analysis and Contextual Task Analysis. Comparably, the analysis of the social and organisational constraints receives much less attention. Through the study of a helicopter Mission Planning System (MPS) software tool, this paper describes an approach for investigating the constraints affecting the distribution of work. The paper uses this model to evaluate the potential benefits of the social and organisational analysis phase within a military context. The analysis shows that, through its focus on constraints the approach provides a unique description of the factors influencing the social organisation within a complex domain. This approach appears to be compatible with existing approaches and serves as a validation of more established social analysis techniques