Programming a User Model with Data Gathered from a User Profile

In order to prevent human error, it is essential to understand the nature of the user’s behaviour. This chapter proposes a combined approach to increase knowledge of user behaviour by instantiating a programmable user model with data gathered from a user profile. Together, the user profile and user model represent, respectively, the static and dynamic characteristics of user behaviour. Typically, user models have been employed by system designers to explore the user decision-making process and its implications, since user profiles do not account for the dynamic aspects of a user interaction. In this chapter, the user profile and model are employed to study human errors—supporting an investigation of the relationship between user errors and user characteristics. The chapter reviews the literature on user profiles and models and presents the proposed user profile and model. It concludes by discussing the application of the proposed approach in the context of electrical systems’ operation.

A Global Process for Model-Driven Approaches in User Interface Design

In user interface design, model-driven approaches usually involve generative solutions, producing interface by successive transformations of a set of initial models. These approaches have obvious limitations, especially for advanced user interfaces. Moreover, top-down design approaches (as generative approaches are) are not appropriate for interactive application development in which users need to be included in the whole design process. Based on strong associations between task models and dialogue models, the authors propose a global process, which facilitates the design of interactive applications conforming to their models, including a rule-checking step. This process permits either to start from a task model or a user-defined prototype. In any case, it allows an iterative development, including iterative user modifications, in line with user-centered design standards.

Interactive Picture Book with Story-Changeable System by Shuffling Pages

In this chapter, the authors introduce SequenceBook system, an interactive picture book that consists of a paper book with very thin IC (Integrated Circuit) tags embedded in each page and an RFID (Radio Frequency IDentification) antenna. This system uses a traditional paper book as an interface and realizes natural interface that keeps the affordance of traditional book and thus smoothly prompts users to experience its contents by just flipping pages in the same way as they read an ordinary book. Another important feature of the system is that users can change its storylines as they like. The system is designed like a bookbinder so that users can easily shuffle pages and make several patterns of stories.

The Bootstrap Discovery Behaviour Model

The chapter focuses on the Bootstrap statistical technique for assigning measures of accuracy to sample estimates, here adopted for the first time to obtain an effective and efficient interaction evaluation. After introducing and discussing the classic debate on p value (i.e., the discovery detection rate) about estimation problems, the authors present the most used model for the estimation of the number of participants needed for an evaluation test, namely the Return On Investment model (ROI). Since the ROI model endorses a monodimensional and economical perspective in which an evaluation process, composed of only an expert technique, is sufficient to identify all the interaction problems—without distinguishing real problems (i.e., identified both experts and users) and false problems (i.e., identified only by experts)—they propose the new Bootstrap Discovery Behaviour (BDB) estimation model. Findings highlight the BDB as a functional technique favouring practitioners to optimize the number of participants needed for an interaction evaluation. Finally, three experiments show the application of the BDB model to create experimental sample sizes to test user experience of people with and without disabilities.

Dynamic Generation of Adaptive Tutoring

Adaptive Educational Systems are able to alter an online course as per the needs of each student. Existing technologies require significant time and effort to design and build such courses. This chapter offers a solution allowing instructors to build a practical adaptive system as they upload their lessons and tests to the online site. The system asks the instructor to associate multiple choice answers that are incorrect with error pattern names and to associate the error patterns with lessons students need to review. The result is that the adaptable system is dynamically built as the course progresses. A student views a student profile screen that is adapted to that student’s level of knowledge and displays that student’s misconceptions. On the other hand, an instructor can use a reports view of the system to extract common error co-occurrences and infer information about the difficulties faced by students in that course.

Designing “Faster” Progress Bars

Human perception of time is fluid, and can be manipulated in purposeful and productive ways. In this chapter, the authors describe and evaluate how progress bar pacing behaviors and graphical design can alter users’ perceptions of an operation’s duration. Although progress bars are relatively simple, they provide an ideal playground in which to experiment with perceptual effects in user interface design. As a baseline in the experiments, the authors use generic, solid-color progress bars with linear pacing behaviors, prevalent in many user interfaces. In a series of direct comparison tests, they are able to rank how different progress bar designs compare to one another. Using these results, it is possible to craft perceptually-optimized progress bars that appear faster, even though their actual duration remains unchanged. Throughout, the authors include design suggestions that can contribute to an overall more responsive, pleasant, and human-centric computing experience.

The Activity Circle

The chapter describes the Activity Circle, a social visualization mechanism based on the concept of Social Proxy, a minimalist graphical representation that portrays socially salient aspects of users’ interactions. The Activity Circle allows users to socialize how they perceive the accomplishment of work activities that are regulated by a workflow technology. The social information visualized by the Activity Circle should primarily allow people to share the distributed viscosity perception about the workflow technology used; perceived distributed viscosity concerns the perception of the extra amount of work required by this technology to fulfill the users’ organization goals, where “distributed” indicates that different groups of users perceive the impact of workflow technology differently. Making this information explicit may help groups of users reconcile the conflicts about disparities introduced by workflow technology. This information could also be used by management to design more equitable workflow technology.

Intelligent Agents with Personality

Conversational agents are a promising interface between humans and computers, but to be acceptable as the virtual humans they pretend to be, they need to be given one of the key elements used to define human beings: a personality. As existing personality taxonomies have been defined only for description, the authors present in this chapter a methodology dedicated to the definition of a computationally-oriented taxonomy, in order to use it to implement personality traits in conversational agents. First, a significant set of personality-traits adjectives is registered from thesaurus sources. Then, the lexical semantics related to personality-traits is extracted while using the WordNet database, and it is given a formal representation in terms of so-called Behavioral Schemes. Finally, the authors propose a framework for the implementation of those schemes as influence operators controlling the decision process and the plan/action scheduling of a rational agent.

Interactive Diagram Layout

The authors also describe a framework that enables the creation of a layout engine, which satisfies the user demands identified in a user study. The approach is capable of defining layout behavior for various visual languages like graphs, class diagrams, mindmaps, business process models, or even GUI forms. The framework enables the combination of different layout approaches and provides the possibility to reuse already defined layout behavior.

Design and Evaluation of a Multimodal Representation for Conveying the Vast Range of Imperceptible Smallness

Teaching and learning the vast range of the sizes that are too small to see (called imperceptible sizes) has been a challenging topic, and a need for a novel form of representation that may provide learners with an alternative way of perceiving and conceptualizing imperceptible sizes emerged. From this, the author introduces a multimodal representation called Temporal-Aural-Visual Representation (TAVR). Unlike commonly used conventional representations (e.g., visual representation), TAVR employs a temporal modality as the main vehicle for conveying imperceptible sizes. In this chapter, the author elaborates on the design process and the details of TAVR. Informed by cognitive psychology research, the mental model and the challenges for learners in understanding imperceptible sizes were identified to form the design requirements of TAVR. Following the design and implementation, the evaluation of TAVR aimed to assess the changes in the participating students’ mental model of the range of imperceptible sizes, which showed TAVR’s positive impact on student learning.