Oral messages improve visual search

Input multimodality combining speech and hand gestures has motivated numerous usability studies. Contrastingly, issues relating to the design and ergonomic evaluation of multimodal output messages combining speech with visual modalities have not yet been addressed extensively. The experimental study presented here addresses one of these issues. Its aim is to assess the actual efficiency and usability of oral system messages including brief spatial information for helping users to locate objects on crowded displays rapidly. Target presentation mode, scene spatial structure and task difficulty were chosen as independent variables. Two conditions were defined: the visual target presentation mode (VP condition) and the multimodal target presentation mode (MP condition). Each participant carried out two blocks of visual search tasks (120 tasks per block, and one block per condition). Scene target presentation mode, scene structure and task difficulty were found to be significant factors. Multimodal target presentation proved to be more efficient than visual target presentation. In addition, participants expressed very positive judgments on multimodal target presentations which were preferred to visual presentations by a majority of participants. Besides, the contribution of spatial messages to visual search speed and accuracy was influenced by scene spatial structure and task difficulty: (i) messages improved search efficiency to a lesser extent for 2D array layouts than for some other symmetrical layouts, although the use of 2D arrays for displaying pictures is currently prevailing; (ii) message usefulness increased with task difficulty. Most of these results are statistically significant.Comment: 4 page

Combining economic and social goals in the design of production systems by using ergonomics standards

In designing of production systems, economic and social goals can be combined, if ergonomics is integrated into the design process. More than 50 years of ergonomics research and practice have resulted in a large number of ergonomics standards for designing physical and organizational work environments. This paper gives an overview of the 174 international ISO and European CEN standards in this field, and discusses their applicability in design proces

Investigation of methods for user adapted visualisation of information in a hypermedia generation system

A literature review of user interaction to support creative processes is given. A design for an authoring system for semi-automatically generated hypermedia presentations is developed. The system designed is called SampLe (a Semi-Automatic Multimedia Presentation generation Environment

The role of avatars in e-government interfaces

This paper investigates the use of avatars to communicate live message in e-government interfaces. A comparative study is presented that evaluates the contribution of multimodal metaphors (including avatars) to the usability of interfaces for e-government and user trust. The communication metaphors evaluated included text, earcons, recorded speech and avatars. The experimental platform used for the experiment involved two interface versions with a sample of 30 users. The results demonstrated that the use of multimodal metaphors in an e-government interface can significantly contribute to enhancing the usability and increase trust of users to the e-government interface. A set of design guidelines, for the use of multimodal metaphors in e-government interfaces, was also produced

LAYLAB : a constraint-based layout manager for multimedia presentations

When developing advanced intelligent user interfaces composing text, graphics, animation, hypermedia etc., the question of automatically designing the graphical layout of such multimedia presentations in an appropriate format plays a crucial role. This paper introduces the task, the functionality and the architecture of the constraint-based multimedia layout manager LayLab

Hypermedia learning and prior knowledge: Domain expertise vs. system expertise

Prior knowledge is often argued to be an important determinant in hypermedia learning, and may be thought of as including two important elements: domain expertise and system expertise. However, there has been a lack of research considering these issues together. In an attempt to address this shortcoming, this paper presents a study that examines how domain expertise and system expertise influence students’ learning performance in, and perceptions of, a hypermedia system. The results indicate that participants with lower domain knowledge show a greater improvement in their learning performance than those with higher domain knowledge. Furthermore, those who enjoy using the Web more are likely to have positive perceptions of non-linear interaction. Discussions on how to accommodate the different needs of students with varying levels of prior knowledge are provided based on the results