Formalizing the Design,Evaluation, and Application of Interaction Techniques for Immersive Virtual Environments

Immersive virtual environments (VEs) have potential in many application areas, but many complex VE systems exhibit usability and interaction problems. This is partly due to a lack of consideration or understanding of 3D interaction tasks and techniques. This paper proposes the systematic study of the design, evaluation, and application of VE interaction techniques. In this methodology, design and evaluation are based on a formal task analysis and categorization of techniques, using multiple performance measures. As a direct consequence of our use of this methodology, we also present a variety of novel designs and evaluation results with respect to interaction techniques for three common VE tasks.     

Concept-Driven Interaction Design Research

In this article, we explore a concept-driven approach to interaction design research with a specific focus on theoretical advancements. We introduce this approach as a complementary approach to more traditional, and well-known, user-centered interaction design approaches. A concept-driven approach aims at manifesting theoretical concepts in concrete designs. A good concept design is both conceptually and historically grounded, bearing signs of the intended theoretical considerations. In the area of human–computer interaction and interaction design research, this approach has been quite popular but not necessarily explicitly recognized and developed as a proper research methodology. In this article, we demonstrate how a concept-driven approach can coexist, and be integrated with, common user-centered approaches to interaction design through the development of a model that makes explicit the existing cycle of prototyping, theory development, and user studies. We also present a set of basic principles that could constitute a foundation for concept driven interaction research, and we have considered and described the methodological implications given these principles. For the field of interaction design research we find this as an important point of departure for taking the next step toward the construction and verification of theoretical constructs that can help inform and guide future design research projects on novel interaction technologies.     

Analysis of quality standards for industrial collaborative robots based on user-centered design framework

Industrial collaborative robots have become increasingly important in recent years due to their ability to work safely and efficiently alongside humans. As a result, there is a growing need for evaluation standards to ensure the quality of collaborative robots. However, existing studies only consider system-centered and technical aspects of collaborative robots, and there is a lack of research on user-centered quality evaluation. In this study, we identified 21 user requirements based on a user-centered design framework and confirmed the limitations of existing quality standards by reviewing the standard clauses for collaborative robots. It was found that user needs to be related to performance, safety, and even usability and enjoyment are already being expressed according to the user-centered design framework, but the quality standards for these needs only present design principles or do not consider them at all. This study provides information on the quality attributes that need to be fulfilled to satisfy user requirements and suggests the need and direction for further research on the user-centered evaluation of collaborative robots. Accordingly, the user's perception and experience of collaborative robots are expected to improve.     

搜索引擎用户行为与用户满意度的关联研究

用户满意度是以用户为中心的搜索引擎性能评价的一个重要分支,区别于传统基于查询与文档相关性的评价方法,基于用户满意度的性能评价能够更加全面、客观地对搜索引擎性能进行评价。该文通过设计搜索实验平台,在尽量不影响用户正常搜索过程的前提下收集用户的搜索行为及其满意度评价,通过用户行为分析的方法挖掘用户群体行为特征与用户查询满意度之间的关联关系。相关结论对提高搜索引擎性能、改善用户查询体验具有一定的参考意义。     

Rapid prototyping and user-centered design of interactive display-based systems

Much work on display-based ubicomp systems (and rapid prototyping in general) focus on producing proof-of-concept demonstrators, usually to gauge technical feasibility and collect initial user feedback. In our work, we've found that it's often equally important to investigate factors such as use and appropriation and that in some cases, without user studies, technical feasibility can be meaningless. We used rapid prototyping combined with a phased, iterative, and user-centered design approach to develop five display-based ubicomp systems for real-world use over time. In this article, we discuss our aims, approach, and lessons learned. The ubicomp systems that we developed and deployed use rapid prototyping techniques and a user-centered design approach.     

Context-aware workflow management for virtual enterprises based on coordination of agents

Although virtual enterprises (VE) make it possible for small flexible enterprises to form a collaborative network to respond to business opportunities through dynamic coalition and sharing of the core competencies and resources, they also pose new challenges and issues. Creation of VE involves dynamically established partnerships between the partners and relies on a flexible coordination scheme. The dynamic organizations formed in VE present a challenge in the development of a new methodology to dynamically allocate re-sources and deliver the relevant information to the right people at the right time. A key issue is the development of an effective workflow management scheme for VE. Multi-agent systems (MAS) provide a flexible architecture to deal with changes based on dynamic organization and collaboration of autonomous agents. Despite the extensive studies and research results on MAS, development of a design methodology to support coordination and operations is critical to the success and adoption of VE. The objectives of this research are to propose a design methodology to facilitate coordination and development of context-aware workflow management systems and achieve effective resource allocation for VE based on MAS architecture. To achieve these objectives, a scheme for coordination of agents is proposed. Petri net models are used in the coordination scheme to describe workflows and capture resource activities in VE. The interactions between agents lead to a dynamic workflow model for VE. Based on the aforementioned model, we propose architecture to dynamically generate context-aware graphical user interface to guide the users and control resource allocation based on the state of VE. An order management example is used throughout this paper to illustrate the proposed design methodology.     

Comirem: an intelligent form for resource management

Comirem (continuous, mixed-initiative resource management) is an "intelligent form" for resource management that is designed to more directly match the iterative, user-centered nature of planning and scheduling in practical domains. In this article, we provide an overview of the current Comirem system. Comirem promotes a graphical, spreadsheet-like model of user-system interaction. The user interacts with the system through Web-based forms that combine visual displays of the current plan and planning state with form-based editing capabilities so that the user can manipulate aspects of the solution and solution state.     

Driving simulation: challenges for VR technology

Virtual driving environments represent a challenging test for virtual reality technology. We present an overview of our work on the problems of scenario and scene modeling for virtual environments (VEs) in the context of the Iowa Driving Simulator (IDS). The requirements of driving simulation-a deterministic real-time software system that integrates components for user interaction, simulation, and scenario and scene modeling-make it a valuable proving ground for VE technologies. The goal of our research is not simply to improve driving simulation, but to develop technology that benefits a wide variety of VE applications. For example, our work on authoring high-fidelity VE databases and on directable scenarios populated with believable agents also targets applications involving interaction with simulated, walking humans and training in the operation of complex machinery. This work has benefited greatly from the experience of developing components for a full-scale operational VE system like IDS, and we believe that many other proposed VE technologies would similarly benefit from such real-world testing     

Designing personal attentive user interfaces in the mobile public safety domain

In the mobile computing environment, there is a need to adapt the information and service provision to the momentary attentive state of the user, operational requirements and usage context. This paper proposes to design personal attentive user interfaces (PAUI) for which the content and style of information presentation is based on models of relevant cognitive, task, context and user aspects. Using the police work environment as the application domain, relevant attributes of these aspects are identified based on literature and domain analyses. We present a user-centered design (UCD) method for the iterative development and validation of the proposed PAUI. Application of this approach provided requirements for (1) adaptation to users’ attentive state, (2) notification, (3) information processing and task switching support and (4) user modeling. We aim at refining and validating the models and requirements through continuing empirical evaluation.     

Dynamic personalization in conversational recommender systems

Conversational recommender systems are E-Commerce applications which interactively assist online users to acquire their interaction goals during their sessions. In our previous work, we have proposed and validated a methodology for conversational systems which autonomously learns the particular web page to display to the user, at each step of the session. We employed reinforcement learning to learn an optimal strategy, i.e., one that is personalized for a real user population. In this paper, we extend our methodology by allowing it to autonomously learn and update the optimal strategy dynamically (at run-time), and individually for each user. This learning occurs perpetually after every session, as long as the user continues her interaction with the system. We evaluate our approach in an off-line simulation with four simulated users, as well as in an online evaluation with thirteen real users. The results show that an optimal strategy is learnt and updated for each real and simulated user. For each simulated user, the optimal behavior is reasonably adapted to this user’s characteristics, but converges after several hundred sessions. For each real user, the optimal behavior converges only in several sessions. It provides assistance only in certain situations, allowing many users to buy several products together in shorter time and with more page-views and lesser number of query executions. We prove that our approach is novel and show how its current limitations can catered.     

TIME – a multi-leveled framework for evaluating and designing digital libraries

Even though these are early days for digital libraries, three decades of research on human-computer interaction in general, and the recent history of hypermedia research in particular, indicate that whatever else occurs, the usability of digital library applications will prove crucial to widespread acceptance. In the present paper an evaluation framework (termed TIME) is outlined. TIME offers designers and implementers of digital libraries a framework to address key human factors in a user-centered manner. Bridging all levels of human factors, from the ergonomic to the user goal, TIME is a multilevel framework that highlights the interplay of multiple issues affecting user response to digital documents. Received: 15 December 1997 / Revised: June 1999     

Lessons learned from the design and evaluation of visual information-seeking systems

Designing information-seeking systems has become an increasingly complex task as today’s information spaces are rapidly growing in quantity, heterogeneity, and dimensionality. The challenge is to provide user interfaces that have a satisfying usability and user experience even for novice users. Although information visualization and interaction design offer solutions, many information-seeking systems such as online catalogs for libraries or web search engines continue to use outdated user-interface concepts developed decades ago. In this paper, we will present four principles that we identified as crucial for the successful design of a modern visual information-seeking system. These are (1) to support various ways of formulating an information need, (2) to integrate analytical and browsing-oriented ways of exploration, (3) to provide views on different dimensions of the information space, and (4) to make search a pleasurable experience. These design principles are based on our experience over a long period in the user-centered design and evaluation of visual information-seeking systems. Accordingly, we will showcase individual designs from our own work of the past 10 years to illustrate each principle and hence narrow the gap between the scientific discussion and the designing practitioner that has often hindered research ideas from becoming reality. However, most of the times search is only one part of a higher level user activity (e.g. writing a paper). Thus future research should focus on the challenges when regarding search in such a broader context. We will use the final two chapters to point out some of these challenges and outline our vision of an integrated and consistent digital work environment named Zoomable Object-oriented Information Landscape.     

Design iterations for a location-aware event planner

We present the user-centered design and testing process of a mobile, location-aware event planner. Using questionnaires, interviews, and discussions with potential users, we investigated the ways individuals plan social events, such as business meetings, dinners and gatherings, and perform the attendant communication tasks. We catalogued the contextually dependent ways in which people plan their meetings and informal social events and devised a wide range of conceptual sketches to address our potential users professed needs. We developed a preliminary PDA-based prototype based on clear conceptual entities (people, places, locations and events) and designed to support short interaction sequences and large maps. Its evaluation with a group of nine participants provided qualitative feedback and prompted an interface redesign. This development process taught us a number of interesting lessons applicable to this category of location-aware applications, which we report at the end of the article. The set of design recommendations can assist designers in the development of location aware systems.     

Human knowledge acquisition from 3D interaction in virtual environments

Recently,virtual environment (VE) based design and planning,which is a kind of interaction intensive computing,has shown great potential.Most users of such systems are specialists or technicians and their 3D interactions with the system embed a great deal of knowledge and skills.Thus,how to integrate human knowledge and skills into VE is a great challenge to researchers in the human computer interaction field.This paper proposes a method for acquiring user knowledge from VE.The main ideas and work include,abstracting the interactive process and formalizing the interactive semantics,as well as providing a semantic model of an interactive information repository,from which user interactive processes can be retrieved and all kinds of application logics can be established.A virtual assembly planning system is introduced as an example of a practical application of this method.Experiments show that the related models can well capture user knowledge and retrieve the interaction process.     

Designing a goal-oriented smart-home environment

Nowadays, systems are growing in power and in access to more resources and services. This situation makes it necessary to provide user-centered systems that act as intelligent assistants. These systems should be able to interact in a natural way with human users and the environment and also be able to take into account user goals and environment information and changes. In this paper, we present an architecture for the design and development of a goal-oriented, self-adaptive, smart-home environment. With this architecture, users are able to interact with the system by expressing their goals which are translated into a set of agent actions in a way that is transparent to the user. This is especially appropriate for environments where ambient intelligence and automatic control are integrated for the user’s welfare. In order to validate this proposal, we designed a prototype based on the proposed architecture for smart-home scenarios. We also performed a set of experiments that shows how the proposed architecture for human-agent interaction increases the number and quality of user goals achieved.     

Manipulating Objects in Virtual Worlds: Categorization and Empirical Evaluation of Interaction Techniques

The acceptance of virtual environment (VE) technology requires scrupulous optimization of the most basic interactions to maximize user performance and provide efficient and enjoyable virtual interfaces. Motivated by insufficient understanding of human factors implications in the design of interaction techniques for object manipulation in virtual worlds, this paper presents results of a formal study that evaluated two basic interaction metaphors for virtual manipulation—virtual pointer and virtual hand—in object selection and positioning tasks. In this work, we survey and categorize current virtual manipulation techniques according to their basic design metaphors, conduct experimental studies of the most basic techniques, and derive guidelines to aid designers in the practical development of VE applications.     

标准化网页界面的交互设计模式研究

交互设计是了解目标用户对产品的期望,分析用户对产品的使用行为,通过一种有效的方式使用户和产品之间产生愉悦的沟通,这样的交互行为会使用户对产品产生信任和依赖,文章主要研究的是如何通过标准化的网页界面增加用户的使用黏性,以达到以用户为中心的交互理念。：     

Usability evaluation of multi-modal biometric verification systems

As a result of the evolution in the field of biometrics, a new breed of techniques and methods for user identity recognition and verification has appeared based on the recognition and verification of several biometric features considered unique to each individual. Signature and voice characteristics, facial features, and iris and fingerprint patterns have all been used to identify a person or just to verify that the person is who he/she claims to be. Although still relatively new, these new technologies have already reached a level of development that allows its commercialization. However, there is a lack of studies devoted to the evaluation of these technologies from a user-centered perspective. This paper is intended to promote user-centered design and evaluation of biometric technologies. Towards this end, we have developed a platform to perform empirical evaluations of commercial biometric identity verification systems, including fingerprint, voice and signature verification. In this article, we present an initial empirical study in which we evaluate, compare and try to get insights into the factors that are crucial for the usability of these systems.     

Interacting with user data – Theory and examples of drama and dramaturgy as methods of exploration and evaluation in user-centered design

In this article, we discuss the application of drama and dramaturgy to user-centered product concept design (UCPCD) processes, aiming to create a more holistic approach to designing user experiences. We present the UCPCD process and its background, and a selection of interactive theater tools that can be applied to UCPCD. Through a case study we introduce a practical implementation of these tools to UCPCD. The paper concludes by suggesting guidelines for using drama and dramaturgy in concept design activities. The key finding is that drama methods deepen the designers’ involvement in the process and improve understanding of the user communities’ behavior.     

A Formal Virtual Enterprise Access Control Model

A virtual enterprise (VE) refers to a cooperative alliance of legally independent enterprises, institutions, or single persons that collaborate with each other by sharing business processes and resources across enterprises in order to raise enterprise competitiveness and reduce production costs. Successful VEs require complete information transparency and suitable resource sharing among coworkers across enterprises. Hence, this investigation proposes a formal flexible integration solution, named the formal VE access control (VEAC) model, based on the role-based AC model, to integrate and share distributed resources owned by VE members. The formal VEAC model comprises a fundamental VEAC model, a project AC policy (PACP) language model, and a model construction methodology. The fundamental VEAC model manages VE resources and the resources of participating enterprises, in which various project relationships are presented to facilitate different degrees of resource sharing across projects and enterprise boundaries, and cooperative modes among VE roles are presented to enable collaboration among coworkers in a VE. This PACP language model features object-subject-action-condition AC policies that jointly determine user access authorizations. In addition, the methodology supplies a systematic method to identify fundamental elements of the VEAC model and to establish assignments between elements and relations.