Exploring Navigation: Towards a Framework for Design and Evaluation of Navigation in Electronic Spaces

PERSONA is an acronym for PERsonal and SOcial NAvigation. The name of the project illustrates its two-fold approach; studying the individual cognitive, social and cultural differences in navigational ability and recognizing that computer users are social beings in interacting with other people as they make their way through information spaces. Based on this understanding we are developing new approaches to interactive system design. One of these is to identify how and where we can adapt to the individual person's needs. At the same time we are developing alternative approaches to system design, breaking away from the lonely 'walker in the woods' picture of the information system user, to a social being able to interact with other users and so get help in achieving their goals. In this first deliverable from the project, we present a comprehensive review of literature which we see as having an impact on navigation in information space. This volume contains a number of individual and co-authored papers covering various aspects of geographic and electronic spaces and on navigation in geographic and electronic spaces; Individual and cultural differences; Social aspects of navigation; Design based on alternative or complimentary approaches that we believe hold the promise of making interfaces and systems more navigable

Voice as a design material : sociophonetic inspired design strategies in Human-Computer Interaction

While there is a renewed interest in voice user interfaces (VUI) in HCI, little attention has been paid to the design of VUI voice output beyond intelligibility and naturalness. We draw on the field of sociophonetics - the study of the social factors that influence the production and perception of speech - to highlight how current VUIs are based on a limited and homogenised set of voice outputs. We argue that current systems do not adequately consider the diversity of peoples’ speech, how that diversity represents sociocultural identities, and how voices have the potential to shape user perceptions and experiences. Ultimately, as other technological developments have influenced the ideologies of language, the voice outputs of VUIs will influence the ideologies of speech. Based on our argument, we pose three design strategies for VUI voice output design - individualisation, context awareness, and diversification - to motivate new ways of conceptualising and designing these technologies

On Spaces and Navigation In and Out of the Computer

Current work on navigation in electronic worlds is based on the assumption that geographic and electronic worlds are similar enough to make it possible to use results from work on environmental psychology and related areas in the design of electronic information spaces. The present paper is an attempt to analyze the underlying assumptions behind this approach in some detail, as well as an a t-tempt to describe a number of different dimensions on which these spaces can differ. We also discuss how these differences might influence user behavior and design

Towards a Dialogue Taxonomy

. Two interrelated points are made in this paper. First, that some of the characteristics of the language used in spoken dialogues are also observed in typed dialogues, since they are a reflection of the fact that it is a dialogue, rather than the fact that it is spoken. A corollary of this is that some of the results obtained in previous work on typed dialogue, especially Wizard of Oz simulations of human-computer natural language dialogues, can be of use to workers on spoken language dialogue systems. Second, it is claimed that we need a more fine grained taxonomy of different kinds of dialogues. Both for making it possible to make use of results obtained by other workers in developing dialogue systems, and for the development of our theoretical understanding of the influence of non-linguistic factors on the language used in human-computer dialogues. A number of such dimensions are described and their influence on the language used is illustrated by results from a empirical studies o..

Kinds Of Agents And Types Of Dialogues

In recent years we have seen an increase in the work on the empirical foundations of computational theories of discourse, as well as in the increased use of empirical evaluation methods for natural language systems. In this paper I argue that presenting results from well conducted empirical studies of particular discourses or dialogues is necessary and important but not enough to foster the development of computational theories of discourse. Equally important is making clear to which other cases of agents and situations the results obtained apply. As far as the issue of agents is concerned, it is argued that present day computational theories of discourse can only be seen as theories of computer's processing of language, and not for all kinds of agents, and some consequences of this position are discussed. When, on the other hand, we come to the issue of dialogue situation I do not present any specific theoretical position. Instead a number of dimensions or parameters that seem to infl..