SENG 310 - Lecture 9

1 February 2015

Interaction Paradigms

Command Based

Pros:
Efficient, precise, fast, B

Cons:
Hard to learn

Tips:
Consistency is naming, e.g., use of first letter

GUIs

Examples:

  • Windows
  • Icons
  • Menus
  • Direct Manipulation

Latest challenge: GUIs for new devices, e.g., watches, tablets, internet of things

Types:

  • Stacking or floating
  • Tiling (without overlap)
  • Dynamic

Solutions include Task based approaches, Docking, Automatic window management

Zoomable User Interfaces

  • Ivan Sutherland (Sketchpad) introduced the idea back in 1962!
  • Smalltalk environment in the 1970’s had the notion of an infinite desktop
  • Zui’s: Pad++ (since 1996!)
  • Virtual desktops favoured over Zui’s generally
  • But the ideas appear in iOS
  • See also Presi (uses the idea for slides)

Menu interface styles:

  • flat lists (good for small number of items)
  • drop down
  • pop up
  • contextual (context of current task)
  • expanding (scrolling, cascading — more flexible, good for long lists but require more precise control)

Issues: naming, placement...

Icons

Pros:

  • Easier to learn and remember than commands
  • Can be positioned in different places, can be compact
  • Attractive (visceral level?)

Cons:

  • Not suitable for all commands
  • Not always clear what they do (e.g., crop)
  • Can be slower to select
  • May need to use text to make them clear

Multi-media

Pros:

  • Rapid access to multiple representations of information
  • Benefits of different media types
  • Appeal to different user styles (learning styles)
  • Can encourage exploration, engaging

Cons: Harder to design applications

Virtual Reality

  • Highly engaging user experiences
  • Mechanisms to engage with objects and navigate in 3D space
  • Computer-generated graphical simulations:
  • “the illusion of participation in a synthetic environment rather than external observation of such an environment”

Pros:

  • High level of fidelity with objects
  • Sense of presence
  • Different viewpoints (1st and 3rd person)
  • Excellent for training

Cons:

  • Head-mounted displays and other devices may be uncomfortable to wear
  • Motion sickness, disorientation issues
  • Expensive to design, use

Augmented and Mixed Reality

Augmented reality: virtual representations are superimposed on physical devices and objects
Mixed reality: views of the real world are combined with views of a virtual environment
Applications: medicine, games, aeronautics etc

Speech

  • Useful for inquiring about specific information or command based and for people with disabilities
  • Used a lot for navigating menu based systems
  • But not as usable as we might hope! Error prone
  • What are your experiences with speech based interfaces?

Pen Interfaces

  • Lightpens or styluses
  • Digital pens (e.g., Anoto)

Pros:

  • Intuitive to use, quick to learn
  • Great for annotation of documents

Cons:

  • Some systems are clunky to use
  • Handwriting recognition has to be learned
  • Occludes the screen

Touch

Pros:

  • Multi-touch support supports bigger range of actions
  • Fluid interaction style
  • Can support fast navigation

Cons:

  • Can be tricky for some to learn
  • Inconsistent across manufacturers
  • Error prone
  • Virtual keyboards can be slower to use than real ones

Air Based Gestures

Uses camera recognition, sensor and computer techniques to recognize people’s body, arm, and hand gestures in a room.

Haptic

  • Tactile feedback
  • Vibration and forces to a person’s body, using actuators that are embedded in their clothing or a device they are carrying, such as smartphone, smart watch
  • Can enrich user experience or nudge them to correct error
  • Can also be used to simulate sense of touch between remote people

Shareable Displays

  • Designed for more than one person to use
  • Allows simultaneous input by co-located groups
  • Large wall displays as well as interactive tabletops

Horizontal Versus Vertical Displays

Horizontal surfaces better for turn-taking and collaborative working
Larger sized tables does not improve group work, but encourages more division of labour

Tangible

  • Physical objects are infused with sensor-based interactions (e.g., bricks are coupled with digital representations)
  • e.g., Chromarium cubes, flow blocks
  • Good for group work, support different ways of exploring and representing a problem space
  • Helps people see situations in a new way

Wearables

  • Head and eyewear mounted cameras to record what was seen and to access digital information
  • Smart fabrics, jewellery

Applications: fashion clothing, ambient displays, tour guides
Pros: Ease of wear, convenience, hands free
Cons: comfort? hygiene? usability?

Robots and Drones

Can be used in remote locations for hazardous situations
Pet robots as human companions, domestic robots
Sociable robots that work collaboratively with humans and communicate and socialize with us
Issues: how will we react to them? Should they be more or less human like? Ethical issues surrounding robots and drones...

Brain Computer Interfaces

  • Provide a communication pathway between a person’s brain waves and an external device, such as a cursor on a screen
  • BCIs work through detecting changes in the neural functioning in the brains
  • For people with certain disabilities, games...

Which Interaction Paradigm to use

Depends on task, users, context, cost, robustness:

  • Learnability
  • Accuracy
  • Length of usage time
  • Space availability
  • Robustness
  • Manual dexterity of the user

Speech interfaces are increasingly common...
Appliance and vehicle interfaces are also more common
Starting to see more shareable and tangible interfaces in homes, schools, public spaces and workplaces

One Concern

Many of these devices and interfaces collect a lot of data about us
New interfaces are increasingly context aware and monitor what we do
Many ethical issues are just emerging...

Assignments

None