Theory, Design and Evaluation – (Don’t Just) Pick any Two

The following discussion takes to heart Benbasat’s (2010) and Lyytinen’s (2010) suggestion that design science techniques should be more fully embraced by the HCI community. Design science approaches, which – in their ideal form – equally emphasize theory, design, and evaluation through an iterative design/research process (Amiel and Reeves, 2008, Hevner et al., 2004, March and Smith, 1995, Markus et al., 2002, Wang and Hannafin, 2005), offer a comprehensive way to tackle many of the complex and sometimes highly subjective design-oriented research questions that are so familiar within the HCI discipline. In this response paper, three typical, high-quality HCI papers are examined in detail to explore the nature of the “pick any two” problem. Suggestions for how missing methodologies might be incorporated into these works through the design science approach are provided. Additionally, a brief review of HCI literature from three publication venues is conducted in order to roughly identify the extent of the “pick any two” problem. Several broad-based reasons for methodology omission are discussed, with suggestions for ways that these institutional challenges might be circumvented or overcome

Comparison of Navigation Techniques for Large Digital Images

Medical images are examined on computer screens in a variety of contexts. Frequently, these images are larger than computer screens, and computer applications support different paradigms for user navigation of large images. The paper reports on a systematic investigation of what interaction techniques are the most effective for navigating images larger than the screen size for the purpose of detecting small image features. An experiment compares five different types of geometrically zoomable interaction techniques, each at two speeds (fast and slow update rates) for the task of finding a known feature in the image. There were statistically significant performance differences between several groupings of the techniques. The fast versions of the ArrowKey, Pointer, and ScrollBar performed the best. In general, techniques that enable both intuitive and systematic searching performed the best at the fast speed, while techniques that minimize the number of interactions with the image were more effective at the slow speed. Additionally, based on a postexperiment questionnaire and qualitative comparison, users expressed a clear preference for the Pointer technique, which allowed them to more freely and naturally interact with the image

Assessing the usability of tile-based interfaces to visually navigate 3-D parameter domains

Navigating 3-D parameter domains, such as color and orientation of an object, is a common task performed in most computer graphics applications. Although 1-D sliders are the most common interface for browsing such domains, they provide a tedious and difficult user experience that hampers finding desirable visual solutions. We present the Rhomb-i slider, a novel and visually enriching tile-based interface to navigate arbitrary 3-D parameter domains. Contrary to 1-D sliders, the Rhomb-i slider supports a sketch-based interface that gives simultaneous access to up to two parameters. We conducted a usability study to ascertain whether the proposed Rhomb-i slider is a more natural interface compared to 1-D sliders and other commonly used widgets for different 3-D parameter domains: HSV color space, super-shape curves, and rotation of a 3-D object. On the one hand, qualitative feedback and performance measures reveal that Rhomb-i sliders have similar results when compared to conventional HSV color interfaces, and are the preferred interface to efficiently explore the super-shapes parameter domain. On the other hand, Rhomb-i revealed to be a less efficient and effective interface to rotate a 3D object, thus paving the way to new design explorations regarding this tile-based interface

Design Science in Human-Computer Interaction: A Model and Three Examples

Humanity has entered an era where computing technology is virtually ubiquitous. From websites and mobile devices to computers embedded in appliances on our kitchen counters and automobiles parked in our driveways, information and communication technologies (ICTs) and IT artifacts are fundamentally changing the ways we interact with our world. Indeed, the world itself changing, becoming ever more artificial. It is a designed world that we have created for ourselves. Human-computer interaction (HCI) scholars are concerned with the interactions that occur between people and technology in this new world: how do IT artifacts impact the human experience, and how can knowledge of the human experience impact the design of new computer-based systems? At the same time, HCI is design-oriented, a community where scholars seek to shape the design of new IT artifacts, and make real improvements to the world we live in. It remains an unresolved challenge to bring these scholarly and design perspectives together. Various models and approaches have been proposed, but current thinking on a design science for HCI is in flux. This multi-paper dissertation draws upon existing literature from HCI, various design communities, and information systems (IS) to develop a new model of design science: the theory, design, and evaluation (TDE) model. The TDE model, informed by an included research paper, envisions that scholarly activities and design activities can occur in parallel across the three stages of theory, design, and evaluation. The TDE model is demonstrated using an additional three included papers, each one taken from a separate TDE design science project. These ongoing projects occur in widely varied contexts - gaming for citizen science, online nuisances, and military history education - but each has the TDE model as its central organizing structure. The papers are examples of TDE knowledge outcomes, but also address design outcomes from each project. The three projects are analyzed and connected directly to various elements of the TDE model itself. In addition, the final chapter describes future directions for the three projects and the TDE model, as well as thinking on the importance of design science in HCI scholarship

Méthodologie et instrumentalisation pour la conception et l'évaluation des claviers logiciels

Avec l'expansion des dispositifs mobiles, l'efficacité de la saisie de texte est un défi de plus en plus important pour l'interaction homme-machine. Or, nous observons que, bien que les claviers type AZERTY ou téléphone, traditionnellement utilisés sur ces supports, soient évalués comme sous-optimaux, et, bien que de nombreuses alternatives évaluées comme plus performantes soient proposées dans la littérature, ces nouvelles alternatives restent très marginalement utilisées. Sur la base de cette observation, nous argumentons que la finalité des évaluations ne tient compte que d'un aspect du clavier, aspect qui n'est pas représentatif de la capacité d'un utilisateur à intégrer les concepts proposés dans son quotidien. Nous proposons en conséquence une stratégie complémentaire d'évaluation sur la base d'une évaluation heuristique des claviers logiciels. Par ailleurs, de manière à faciliter la mise en œuvre des évaluations et simplifier le design de nouveaux claviers, nous proposons une nouvelle version (E-Assist II) de la plate-forme E-Assiste. Elle permet, en premier lieu, de facilité le design et le déroulement des expérimentations, et plus largement d'encadrer les évaluations théoriques, expérimentales et heuristiques des claviers. Une version TinyEAssist permet également de déployer des expérimentations sur des supports mobiles (téléphones portables notamment). En second lieu, sur la base de l'étude de la structure des claviers logiciels, nous avons de plus proposé un langage de spécification des claviers permettant de générer des claviers logiciels complexes (interagissant potentiellement avec des systèmes de prédiction) à des fins d'expérimentation ou de simple usage. Enfin, sur la base des critères de performance mis en évidence par les évaluations heuristiques, nous proposons quatre nouveaux paradigmes de claviers. Parmi ces paradigmes deux ont offert des perspectives particulièrement intéressantes : en premier lieu le clavier multi-layer consistant à conduire progressivement, au cours d'une période transitoire, un utilisateur d'une distribution de touches type AZERTY vers une distribution de touches optimisée ; Le second consistant à faciliter l'accès aux caractères type accents, majuscules ou ponctuation, souvent déconsidérés dans l'optimisation des claviers logiciels.The expansion of mobile devices turn text input performances a major challenge for Human-Machine Interaction. We observed that, even if traditional QWERTY soft keyboards or telephone based soft keyboard were evaluated as poorly efficient, and, even if several alternatives evaluated as more efficient were proposed in the research field, these new alternatives are rarely used. Based on this observation, we argue that the goal of soft keyboard evaluation focus on long term performances whereas does not take into account the perspective for a user to use it in his quotidian. Consequently, we propose a complementary evaluation strategy base on heuristic evaluation methodology. In order to ease the evaluation and design of new soft keyboards, we proposed a new version (E-Assist II) of the E-Assiste plate-form. This plate-form aims, at first, to facilitate the design and procedure of experimentations and, more generally, to guide the theoretical, experimental and heuristic evaluations. A compact version (TinyEAssist) enables to perform experimentation on mobile environment such as mobile phone. At second, based on soft keyboard structure study, we proposed a keyboard specification language enabling to generate complex keyboard (including soft keyboard interacting with prediction systems). The generated soft keyboards may be used into the experimentation plate-form or interacting with the exploration system. At last, based on the criteria highlighted by the heuristic evaluation, we proposed four new soft keyboard paradigms. Among them two paradigms showed interesting perspectives: at first the multilayer keyboard consist in accompanying the user from a standard QWERTY layout to an optimized layout during a transition period; the second consist in accelerating the access to the characters such as accents, upper-case, punctuation, etc., frequently ignored in the keyboard optimizations

Techniques d'interaction multimodales pour l'accès aux mathématiques par des personnes non-voyantes

Cette thèse s‟inscrit dans le domaine de l‟interaction Homme-Machine et plus précisément dans celui des interfaces multimodales destinées aux non-voyants. Elle a pour thème principal la présentation des expressions mathématiques aux non-voyants. Pour les étudiants non-voyants, apprendre les mathématiques est une tâche ardue et peut constituer une barrière, les séparant des disciplines techniques. Les travaux de recherche présentés ici décrivent les problèmes rencontrés dans la conception d‟un système permettant l‟accès aux mathématiques pour les utilisateurs déficients visuels. En effet, nous présentons une analyse des outils existants puis nous proposons des solutions pour combler leurs insuffisances. Nous exposons les techniques utilisées au sein de notre système pour répondre aux problèmes de la présentation des expressions mathématiques aux non-voyants. Nous exploitons la multimodalité comme technique d‟interaction pour développer des applications destinées à ce type d‟utilisateurs parce qu‟elle offre plusieurs opportunités grâce à sa richesse des interactions. Nous dotons également notre système d‟un comportement intelligent pour assurer une certaine autonomie à l‟utilisateur. En effet, le système est capable de présenter l‟information en fonction du contexte de l‟interaction (c-à-d. l‟utilisateur, son environnement et sa machine) et de la nature de l‟information. Le système est « pervasif » et adaptatif. L‟accès à l‟information est assuré n‟importe où n‟importe quand et il s‟adapte dynamiquement aux changements du contexte tout en fournissant continuellement des services à l‟utilisateur non-voyant, sans intervention humaine. Pour rendre le système adaptatif, nous avons élaboré un modèle qui détermine la complexité de l‟expression mathématique et nous avons intégré une technique d‟apprentissage automatique pour implémenter les mécanismes de décisions. Enfin, l‟architecture proposée est du type multi-agent. Ces techniques ont été validées par des études de cas et en utilisant les réseaux de Pétri et l‟outil de simulations JADE

Presence 2005: the eighth annual international workshop on presence, 21-23 September, 2005 University College London (Conference proceedings)

OVERVIEW (taken from the CALL FOR PAPERS) Academics and practitioners with an interest in the concept of (tele)presence are invited to submit their work for presentation at PRESENCE 2005 at University College London in London, England, September 21-23, 2005. The eighth in a series of highly successful international workshops, PRESENCE 2005 will provide an open discussion forum to share ideas regarding concepts and theories, measurement techniques, technology, and applications related to presence, the psychological state or subjective perception in which a person fails to accurately and completely acknowledge the role of technology in an experience, including the sense of 'being there' experienced by users of advanced media such as virtual reality. The concept of presence in virtual environments has been around for at least 15 years, and the earlier idea of telepresence at least since Minsky's seminal paper in 1980. Recently there has been a burst of funded research activity in this area for the first time with the European FET Presence Research initiative. What do we really know about presence and its determinants? How can presence be successfully delivered with today's technology? This conference invites papers that are based on empirical results from studies of presence and related issues and/or which contribute to the technology for the delivery of presence. Papers that make substantial advances in theoretical understanding of presence are also welcome. The interest is not solely in virtual environments but in mixed reality environments. Submissions will be reviewed more rigorously than in previous conferences. High quality papers are therefore sought which make substantial contributions to the field. Approximately 20 papers will be selected for two successive special issues for the journal Presence: Teleoperators and Virtual Environments. PRESENCE 2005 takes place in London and is hosted by University College London. The conference is organized by ISPR, the International Society for Presence Research and is supported by the European Commission's FET Presence Research Initiative through the Presencia and IST OMNIPRES projects and by University College London

Edição e visualização criativa de vídeo

Tese de mestrado, Engenharia Informática (Arquitectura, Sistemas e Redes de Computadores), Universidade de Lisboa, Faculdade de Ciências, 2009Este trabalho pretende contribuir para as áreas da visualização e edição criativa de vídeo, criando novas formas de visualização de vídeos. Os vídeos são constituídos por imagens, texto e áudio que variam ao longo do tempo, constituindo informação muito rica mas que ao mesmo tempo é muito complexa. Esta complexidade oferece um desafio a explorar, e a visualização surge como uma forma de exploração e ajuda para simplificar o acesso à informação contida nos vídeos. Com essa informação podem ser criados espaços de vídeo que podem ser usados como plataforma de suporte à expressão da criatividade e como suporte a tarefas de edição, através de funcionalidades como pesquisa e organização de vídeos. Nesse sentido foi desenvolvido um ambiente interactivo para visualizar e explorar espaços de vídeo com ênfase em aspectos da cor e movimento dos vídeos, por serem propriedades visuais importantes, tanto a um nível individual como colectivo – o ColorsInMotion. Este sistema é constituído por dois módulos: o Video Analyzer e o Viewer. No Video Analyzer são postas em prática técnicas de processamento e análise de vídeo e são criadas visualizações em diferentes espaços de cor, permitindo ver diferentes perspectivas sobre os resultados. No Viewer dá-se ênfase à visualização interactiva, permitindo ao utilizador navegar num espaço de vídeos e explorá-lo, tanto a nível colectivo como individual, de forma criativa. No Viewer é possível efectuar pesquisas por cor, servindo também como um sistema de organização, permitindo explorar ligações entre os diferentes vídeos, neste caso, num contexto cultural, com vídeos de dança e música de vários países. Também foram exploradas várias formas de interacção com o sistema, como a interacção por detecção de cor e a interacção gestual, que são indicadas para ambientes de instalação interactiva.This work intends to make a contribution in the field of creative video editing and visualization, developing new ways to visualize videos. Videos are made of images, text and audio all combined and changing with time, making for information, that is, at the same time, very rich and very complex. This complexity offers a challenge to explore, and visualization is one way to help explore and simplify the access to this information, that is contained within the videos. With this information we can create video spaces that can be used as a platform to support the expression of creativity and as a help to video editing tasks, through features such as video search and organization. With this purpose in mind, an interactive environment was developed to visualize and explore video spaces with focus on important visual video properties like color and movement – ColorsInMotion. This system has two modules: the Video Analyzer and the Viewer. In the Video Analyzer we use the techniques of video processing and analysis, and we create different visualizations on different color spaces, allowing different perspectives over the results. In the Viewer we focus on interactive visualization and creativity, giving the user the possibility to browse and explore video spaces, in a creative way, on a collective level, but also on an individual level. In the Viewer we can search by color, serving as a system to organize videos and also serving as a platform to explore connections between different vídeos, in this case, in a cultural context, with videos of dances and music from various countries. We also explored interaction methods to use with the system, like the color detection interaction and the gesture based interaction, that are good for artistic installation environments

Interaktive Suchprozesse in komplexen Arbeitssituationen - Ein Retrieval Framework

In recent years a steady increase of information produced in organizations can be noticed. In order to stay competitive, companies have a growing interest in reusing existing knowledge from past projects. Furthermore, a complete picture of the available information is necessary to be able to make informed decisions. The variety and complexity of information in modern organizations often exceeds the capabilities of the currently deployed enterprise search solutions. The reasons for that are manifold and range from non-linked information from multiple software systems to missing functionality to support users during search tasks. Existing search engines often do not support the search paradigms necessary in these environments. On many occasions, users are not aware of the results they will find during the formulation of the search queries. Additionally, the aspect of knowledge building and the identification of new insights into the available data is a priority for the users. Therefore, search paradigms are useful to provide users with tools that support exploratory navigation in a data set and help them to recognize relationships between search results. The goal of this publication is the introduction of a framework that supports exploratory searches in an organizational setting. The described LFRP-framework is built on top of four pillars. 1. The multi-layer functionality allows users to formulate complex search queries referring to more than one result type. Therewith, it enables search queries that - starting from a set of relevant projects - allow selections of documents that are linked to these projects. 2. The search paradigm of faceted searching supports users in formulating search queries incrementally by offering dynamic and valid filter criteria that avoid empty result sets. 3. By combining the concept of faceted search with the capability to influence the search result order based on filter criteria, users can define in a fine-grained way which criteria values shall be weighted stronger or weaker in the search results. The interaction with the ranking is conducted transparently by the so-called user preference functions. 4. The last pillar consists of the visualization type of parallel coordinates covering two tasks in the search user interface of the LFRP-Framework. On the one hand, users formulate their search queries solely graphically in the parallel coordinates and on the other hand they obtain a visual representation of the search results and are able to discover relationships between search results and their facets. The framework is introduced formally from a query model point of view as well as a prototypical implementation. It enables users to access large linked data sets by navigation and constitutes a contribution to a comprehensive information strategy for organizations.Seit einigen Jahren ist ein stetiges Ansteigen der Menge an Informationen, die in Unternehmen erzeugt werden, festzustellen. Um als Unternehmen wettbewerbsfähig zu bleiben, ist es notwendig, vorhandenes Wissen wiederzuverwenden, um aus vergangenen Projektergebnissen profitieren zu können. Weiterhin ist ein vollständiges Informationsbild unabdingbar, um informierte Entscheidungen treffen zu können. Die Informationsvielfalt in modernen Unternehmen übersteigt häufig die Fähigkeiten aktuell anzutreffender unternehmensweiter Suchlösungen. Die Gründe hierfür sind vielfältig und reichen von nicht verknüpften Informationen aus verschiedenen Softwaresystemen bis hin zu fehlenden Funktionen, um den Nutzer bei der Suche zu unterstützen. Vorhandene Suchfunktionen im Unternehmen unterstützen häufig nicht die Suchparadigmen, die in diesem Umfeld notwendig sind. Vielfach ist den Suchenden bei der Formulierung ihrer Suchanfrage nicht bekannt, welche Ergebnisse sie finden werden. Stattdessen steht der Aspekt des Wissensaufbaus und der Gewinnung neuer Einsichten in den vorhandenen Daten im Vordergrund. Hierzu werden Suchparadigmen benötigt, die dem Nutzer Werkzeuge zur Verfügung stellen, die ein exploratives Navigieren im Datenbestand erlauben und ihnen bei der Erkennung von Zusammenhängen in den Suchergebnissen unterstützen. Das Ziel dieser Arbeit ist die Vorstellung eines Rahmenwerks, dass explorative Suchvorhaben im Unternehmensumfeld unterstützt. Das beschriebene LFRP-Framework baut auf vier Säulen auf. 1. Die Multi-Layer Funktionalität erlaubt es Nutzern, komplexe Suchanfragen zu formulieren, die sich auf mehr als einen Ergebnistyp beziehen. Dies ermöglicht beispielsweise Suchabfragen, die - ausgehend von einer Menge von relevanten vergangenen Projekten - Selektionen auf den dazugehörigen Dokumenten erlauben. 2. Das Suchparadigma der facettierten Suche unterstützt Nutzer bei der inkrementellen Formulierung von Suchanfragen mithilfe von dynamisch angebotenen Filterkriterien und vermeidet leere Ergebnismengen durch die Bereitstellung gültiger Filterkriterien. 3. Die Erweiterung der facettierten Suche um die Möglichkeit, die Suchergebnisreihenfolge basierend auf Filterkriterien zu beeinflussen, erlaubt es Nutzern feingranular vorzugeben, welche Kriterienausprägungen im Suchergebnis stärker gewichtet werden sollen. Für den Nutzer geschieht die Beeinflussung des Rankings transparent über sogenannte Nutzerpräferenzfunktionen. 4. Die letzte Säule umfasst die Visualisierung der parallelen Koordinaten, die in der Suchoberfläche des LFRP-Frameworks zwei Aufgaben übernimmt. Zum einen formuliert der Nutzer damit die Suchanfrage ausschließlich grafisch über die Visualisierung und zum anderen erhält er eine grafische Repräsentation der Suchergebnisse und kann so leichter Beziehungen zwischen Suchergebnissen und deren Facetten erkennen. Das Framework, welches in dieser Arbeit formal aus Sicht des Anfragemodells sowie als prototypische Umsetzung betrachtet wird, ermöglicht Nutzern den navigierenden Zugriff auf große vernetze Datenbestände und stellt einen Baustein einer umfassenden Informationsstrategie für Unternehmen dar