Effects of Asymmetry between Design Models and User Models on Subjective Comprehension of User Interface

This study attempted to discuss the design principles for enhancing usability in terms of asymmetry of mental models between users and designers. If the user model is asymmetrical to the design model, i.e., the degree of agreement between models is low and the user's mental model is not compatible with the actual system, the user cannot operate the system properly, which may cause errors. The aim of this study was to investigate the characteristics of users who have asymmetrical mental models and identify what such users did not understand. Twenty-four subjects participated in an experiment that involved a digital camera operation task and mental model tests that measure the level of the agreement of the mental model construction in terms of functional and structural models. Initially, the participants were grouped based on mental model test scores: symmetrical mental model group (n = 17) and asymmetrical mental model group (n = 7). Then, the groups were compared in terms of performance and subjective comprehension. The comparison indicated that the symmetrical mental model group performed more quickly and accurately than the asymmetrical group. The results also confirmed that the asymmetrical mental model group had a lower level of comprehension in terms of understanding the device status, detecting and responding to device status changes, and understanding the hierarchical structure of the screen

User Interface Abstraction for enabling TV set based Inclusive Access to the Information Society

199 p.The television (TV) set is present in most homes worldwide, and is the most used Information and Communication Technology (ICT). Despite its large implantation in the market, the interactive services consumption on TV set is limited. This thesis focuses on overcoming the following limiting factors: (i) limited Human Computer Interaction and (ii) lack of considering user’s real life context in the digital television (dTV) service integration strategy. Making interactive services accessible to TV set’s large user base, and especially to the most vulnerable ones, is understood as the path to integrate the mankind with the information society. This thesis explores the use of user interface abstraction technologies to reach the introduced goals. The main contributions of this thesis are: (i) an approach to enable the universally accessible remote control of the TV set, (ii) an approach for the provision of universally accessible interactive services through TV sets, and (iii) an approach for the provision of universally accessible services in the TV user’s real life context. We have implemented the contributing approaches for different use cases, and we have evaluated them with real users, achieving good results

Destination-Imagination: An Introduction to the Memorial Art Gallery

The purpose of this CD-ROM is to provide children with an introduction to the Memorial Art Gallery as well as teach them how to look at art. The project will consist of two parts: a tour of the gallery and a section where children will be taught how to understand art. The presentation may be used in a kiosk, in a classroom as a teaching aid, or in a media center. The target audience will be kindergarten through sixth-grade children. The final product may be distributed to local schools and can also be used as a template by other galleries and museums. The interface will be adequately designed with the intended audience in mind so that children in the aforementioned age group will be able to easily interact with it. The possibility that this product may be used either by an individual or in a classroom setting where a number of people may be using it simultaneously will also be addressed

A Tangible Interface for the AMI Content Linking Device -- The Automated Meeting Assistant

In this Paper we describe our approach to support ongoing meetings with an automated meeting assistant. The system based on the AMIDA Content Linking Device aims at providing relevant documents used in previous meetings for the ongoing meeting based on automatic speech recognition. Once the content linking device finds documents linked to a discussion about a similar subject in a previous meeting, it assumes they may be relevant for the current discussion as well. We believe that the way these documents are offered to the meeting participants is equally important as the way they are found. We developed a projection based mixed reality user interface that lets the documents appear on the table tops in front of the meeting participants. They can hand them over to others or bring them onto the shared projection screen easily if they consider them relevant for others as well. Yet, irrelevant documents do not draw too much attention from the discussion. In this paper we describe the concept and implementation of this user interface and provide some preliminary results

Testing and debugging functional reactive programming

Many types of interactive applications, including video games, raise particular challenges when it comes to testing and debugging. Reasons include de-facto lack of reproducibility and difficulties of automatically generating suitable test data. This paper demonstrates that certain variants of Functional Reactive Programming (FRP) implemented in pure functional languages can mitigate such difficulties by offering referential transparency at the level of whole programs. This opens up for a multi-pronged approach for assisting with testing and debugging that works across platforms, including assertions based on temporal logic, recording and replaying of runs (also from deployed code), and automated random testing using QuickCheck. The approach has been validated on real, non-trivial games implemented in the FRP system Yampa through a tool providing a convenient Graphical User Interface that allows the execution of the code under scrutiny to be controlled, moving along the execution time line, and pin-pointing of violations of assertions on PCs as well as mobile platforms

Evaluation of frameworks for creating end-to-end mobile services with OMA MMS as a use case

Masteroppgave i informasjons- og kommunikasjonsteknologi 2005 - Høgskolen i Agder, GrimstadSeveral frameworks are available in 3GPP networks to create mobile services, such as the Open Service Access (OSA) Application Programming Interface (API) and the native Session Initiation Protocol (SIP). Each of these frameworks has their own advantages and disadvantages. Therefore it is important for a service to use a framework which suits its own requirements as best as possible. In this thesis we have defined a use case, TMMS Service. This use case has been designed for four frameworks selected, which are: GPRS, IMS, OSA API and OSA Parlay X Web Services. We have then evaluated the design of these services against a set of evaluation criteria. The evaluation criteria cover security, usability, modifiability, reliability, interoperability and billability. Our evaluation has proved that none of the frameworks are superior in all areas. The best framework overall is IMS which provides a lot of end-to-end features and is also very extensible. One of the biggest disadvantages with IMS is the current lack of a specific set of documentation for application developers

Interaction Methods for Smart Glasses : A Survey

Since the launch of Google Glass in 2014, smart glasses have mainly been designed to support micro-interactions. The ultimate goal for them to become an augmented reality interface has not yet been attained due to an encumbrance of controls. Augmented reality involves superimposing interactive computer graphics images onto physical objects in the real world. This survey reviews current research issues in the area of human-computer interaction for smart glasses. The survey first studies the smart glasses available in the market and afterwards investigates the interaction methods proposed in the wide body of literature. The interaction methods can be classified into hand-held, touch, and touchless input. This paper mainly focuses on the touch and touchless input. Touch input can be further divided into on-device and on-body, while touchless input can be classified into hands-free and freehand. Next, we summarize the existing research efforts and trends, in which touch and touchless input are evaluated by a total of eight interaction goals. Finally, we discuss several key design challenges and the possibility of multi-modal input for smart glasses.Peer reviewe

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

Touch Screen User Interface for Electric Car

Tato práce navrhuje dotykové uživatelské rozhraní pro elektromobily. Rozhraní bylo navrženo tak, aby bylo pohodlné na použití pro řidiče a aby bylo snadné z něj vyčíst potřebné informace. Aby bylo možné toto rozhraní integrovat do elektromobilu, tato práce také navrhuje potřebnou softwarovou a systémovou (hardwarovou) architekturu. Nakonec shrnuje co je ještě potřeba udělat, aby bylo možné celý systém integrovat.This work proposes a touch screen user interface for elecric cars. The user interface aims to be comfortable for the driver to use and to offer easy way of getting information about various car functions. To be able to integrate this interface to the car, this work also proposes necessary software and system (hardware) architecture. In the end it summarizes what should be done next to integrate the whole system.