Reconnaissance: A Widely Applicable Approach Encouraging Well-Informed Choices in Computer-Based Tasks

The aim of this thesis is to propose and demonstrate a novel approach to human-computer cooperation in exploratory tasks, that encourages the pursuit of thorough explorations and thus increases the likelihood of finding the best available results. The thesis identifies a class of computer-supported tasks - such as artifact design, decision analysis, data presentation, and many kinds of retrieval - that all involve an exploration among alternative result specifications to find one whose outcome best fits the user's current needs. Such explorations cannot be automated, but must be directed by the user. Since there is typically no way of knowing in advance what results are available, the user must continually trade off the effort required for further exploration against the unknown chance of discovering results preferable to those found so far. The more arduous the exploration is perceived to be, the greater the user's temptation to accept early results without due consideration of alternatives. By using a new illumination zone model to analyse existing systems, the root of the problem is characterised as a lack of support for visualising the trade-offs between results in terms of the criteria that the user feels are significant at the time. Reconnaissance - in the familiar sense of using scouts to examine unknown territory - provides a suitable metaphor for the task of instructing a computer to generate a range of results, to summarise them according to the current set of criteria, and to collate these summaries into a single visualisation. A challenge in supporting computer-based reconnaissance is the provision of a convenient interface that integrates the requesting, viewing and comparison of result summaries. An implemented example of reconnaissance support shows that the parallel coordinates plotting technique can be extended into an interactive form that meets this challenge. Tests carried out on this implementation, which provided reconnaissance facilities for an existing document formatting system, confirmed that more thorough explorations were indeed encouraged. The tests also brought to light additional, unforeseen advantages to the use of result ranges and summarisation

Building a Design Family: Explicit Support for Contingency Handling and Exploratory Design in Multimedia Authoring

Multimedia presentations are often intended to cater for a wide range of viewing scenarios, encompassing variety with respect to factors including the delivery platform, audience experience level and individual reader preferences. Existing presentation-building tools either make no provision for such variation, or go some way by providing generic information structures that are interpreted at the time of information delivery to produce a supposedly appropriate presentation. For the moment, at least, this latter approach has severe limitations, simply because no tool designer yet has sufficient experience in multimedia communication to define generic structures that will serve a suitable range of presentation intent and readers' needs. This report proposes an authoring approach that avoids these limitations, by explicitly recognising the authoring task as the creation of a family of designs. Building their presentations in a constraint-based environment that directly represents the desi..

'Subjunctive Interface' Support for Combining Context-Dependent Semi-Structured Resources

Many new kinds of tool are being developed to take advantage of the increasing use of XML for expressing semi-structured information. One category of support is the provision of interactive tools that let people request and control the merging of disparate resources. However, these tools typically assume that the users have a clear idea of exactly how they wish to combine the resources, and that the resources in question can be joined unambiguously as requested. This paper introduces an approach to supporting integration in cases in which these conditions might not hold, for example because the resources contain alternative values intended to suit various different contexts of use

Usability studies on a visualisation for parallel display and control of alternative scenarios

Many applications require comparison between alternative scenarios; most support it poorly. A subjunctive interface supports comparison through its facilities for parallel setup, viewing and control of scenarios. To evaluate the usability and benefits of these facilities, we ran experiments in which subjects used both a simple and a subjunctive interface to make comparisons in a census data set. In the first experiment, subjects reported higher satisfaction and lower workload with the subjunctive interface, and relied less on interim marks on paper. Subjects also used fewer interface actions. However, we found no reduction in task completion time, mainly because some subjects encountered problems in using the facilities for setting up and controlling scenarios. Based on a detailed analysis of subjects ’ actions we redesigned the subjunctive interface to alleviate frequent problems, such as accidentally adjusting only one scenario when the intention was to adjust them all. At the end of a second, five-session experiment, users of this redesigned interface completed tasks 27 % more quickly than with the simple interface

An Enhanced Spreadsheet Supporting Calculation-Structure Variants, and Its Application to Web-Based Processing

Abstract. This paper reports our work towards an end user environment for building and experimenting with federations of Web-based processing resources. We present the key concepts and an initial interface for the RecipeSheet, a spreadsheet-like environment with explicit support for creating and comparing alternative scenarios, based on the principles of subjunctive interfaces. A key feature of the RecipeSheet is that alternative scenarios can differ in terms of the processing used to calculate cells’ values; in the context of the Web, this is useful for gathering and comparing results from alternative resources that offer nominally the same processing. We show various usage cases for our prototype, including an example from Web-based bioinformatics. 1 Combining Web-Based Resources One characteristic of what many people now refer to as ‘Web 2.0 ’ [12] is the offering of Web resources not through monolithic, one-stop sites but as finegrained service-providing components. Components from different providers ca

Side-by-side display and control of multiple scenarios: Subjunctive interfaces for exploring multi-attribute data

Information exploration often involves specifying alternative values for some set of parameters, and comparing the corresponding results. Some interfaces allow only one scenario, i.e., one set of parameter values, to be handled at a time. To compare results, the user must therefore switch repeatedly among the scenarios of interest and must remember details of the results seen so far. A subjunctive-interface approach may reduce this burden on the user. Subjunctive interfaces let users establish, view and adjust multiple scenarios in parallel, so that results can be compared side by side. As an illustration, we describe two subjunctive interfaces for comparing queries over a multi-attribute dataset. In both designs the query results are shown side by side, but in one case the input parameters ’ available values are laid out in menus, marked to show which queries use each value; in the other case the parameters are controlled by sliders, with the parameters ’ values in the different queries displayed side by side like the results. Both designs appear to offer advantages over other exploration interfaces, because they reduce the number of interface actions required and the information that users must remember. 1