基于用户认知能力的自助服务终端界面交互设计方法

大众用户认知能力的多样性问题一直是自助服务终端界面交互设计领域的一大挑战。基于分布式认知理论对自助服务终端界面交互活动进行分析和建模, 确定人机交互过程中交互活动和信息呈现之间的关系, 并在此基础上提出基于用户认知能力的自助服务终端界面交互设计方法。采用这种方法, 设计人员首先要进行用户调研, 识别出需要照顾的用户群体, 然后进行认知能力分析, 建立用户认知负荷模型, 接下来描述用户的交互行为, 确定基本的交互框架, 再运用通用可用性设计方法建立交互设计矩阵, 提出交互设计方案。以酒店自助服务终端为实例, 采用该方法制定设计方案, 通过与传统方法形成的设计方案进行对比, 验证所提设计方法的有效性。这种交互设计方法能够帮助设计人员开发易于大众用户理解和使用的自助服务终端界面, 降低用户的认知负荷, 更好地满足自助服务终端用户的认知多样性需求。     

A method of constructing an inspiration library driven by user-perceived preference evaluation data for biologically inspired design

Biologically inspired design (BID) is one of the common methods for product design. To solve the problem of inaccurate acquisition of inspirational creatures due to the lack of user perception preference analysis, a data-driven intelligent service model for BID considering user perception needs is proposed based on Kansei engineering. Firstly, by extracting the perceptual features of creatures from the semantic source elements of products through mapping and encodes them, we proposed a data acquisition method based on intuitionistic fuzzy sets considering different customer preference distributions, bridging the gap caused by the asymmetry between designers and users. Secondly, the functional relationship between biometric features and user-perceived attributes is identified and predicted, and a predictive model of biodata considering user preferences is obtained by multiple linear regression analysis. Finally, based on the data clustering and reorganization theory to understand the organization and dynamics of the database, the construction of a BID library was completed, and the design resources in the library were used as analyzed knowledge for designers to plan design activities. Taking the bionic design of a UAV product as an example, a prototype of a computer-aided design service system was developed based on the theory proposed in the article, and the analyzed knowledge was used to improve the efficiency and science of the design, effectively verifying the usefulness of this study for design. To a certain extent, this study addresses the problem of cognitive limitations of designers and cognitive differences between designers and users, promotes the application of bioinspiration in product design, and improves the marketability of design solutions.     

Predicting user preferences of environment design: a perceptual mechanism of user interface customisation

It is a well-known fact that users vary in their preferences and needs. Therefore, it is very crucial to provide the customisation or personalisation for users in certain usage conditions that are more associated with their preferences. With the current limitation in adopting perceptual processing into user interface personalisation, we introduced the possibility of inferring interface design preferences from the user’s eye-movement behaviour. We firstly captured the user’s preferences of graphic design elements using an eye-tracker. Then we diagnosed these preferences towards the region of interests to build a prediction model for interface customisation. The prediction models from eye-movement behaviour showed a high potential for predicting users’ preferences of interface design based on the paralleled relation between their fixation and saccadic movement. This mechanism provides a novel way of user interface design customisation and opens the door for new research in the areas of human–computer interaction and decision-making.     

SmallWorlds: Visualizing Social Recommendations

We present SmallWorlds, a visual interactive graph‐based interface that allows users to specify, refine and build item‐preference profiles in a variety of domains. The interface facilitates expressions of taste through simple graph interactions and these preferences are used to compute personalized, fully transparent item recommendations for a target user. Predictions are based on a collaborative analysis of preference data from a user's direct peer group on a social network. We find that in addition to receiving transparent and accurate item recommendations, users also learn a wealth of information about the preferences of their peers through interaction with our visualization. Such information is not easily discoverable in traditional text based interfaces. A detailed analysis of our design choices for visual layout, interaction and prediction techniques is presented. Our evaluations discuss results from a user study in which SmallWorlds was deployed as an interactive recommender system on Facebook.     

Visual and manual loadings with QWERTY-like ambiguous keyboards: Relevance of letter-key assignments on mobile phones

Mobile phone touchscreens have many ergonomic problems related to text entry. Previous studies, which attempted to use ambiguous keyboards to resolve problem of small keys, focused on the disambiguation process without consideration of the user loading on graphic user interface. This study investigates user loadings, which interfere with performance in the key selection phase when using an ambiguous keyboard. Hence, three QWERTY-like ambiguous keyboards and a standard QWERTY keyboard were compared via visual search and manual operation experiments. The visual search experiment shows that layouts with many letters per key were strongly related to long visual search times, and layouts with large keys were operated faster and more accurately in the manual operation experiment. Consequently, the trade-off between visual and manual loading differed among different letter-key assignments. This study is important in that it elucidates the impacts of visual and manual loadings on ambiguous keyboards, as well as in providing user interface designers with an enhanced understanding of how to design ambiguous keyboards based on user criteria.Relevance to industryAmbiguous keyboard designs in previous studies were generally far from the actual needs of users. This study examines the factors affecting text entry performance of users via the user-centered approach, improving the understanding of designers.     

基于协同过滤的水果推荐系统设计与实现

随着大数据技术的飞速发展,从大量的信息中如何让用户发现和挖掘出有价值的信息,一直是人们研究的热点问题。推荐系统的发展起到了关键作用,主要是发现用户和商品之间的信息,一方面为用户找到有价值的信息,另一方面为用户推荐感兴趣的商品,从而实现了用户和信息生成者的共赢。基于协同过滤的水果推荐系统通过分析用户的历史行为了解用户的喜好,在为用户提供其感兴趣的信息的同时,也能够实现个性化的推荐。     

User-Centred Design of Flexible Hypermedia for a Mobile Guide: Reflections on the HyperAudio Experience

A user-centred design approach involves end-users from the very beginning. Considering users at the early stages compels designers to think in terms of utility and usability and helps develop a system based on what is actually needed. This paper discusses the case of HyperAudio, a context-sensitive adaptive and mobile museum guide developed in the late 1990s. User requirements were collected via a survey to understand visitors’ profiles and visit styles in natural science museums. The knowledge acquired supported the specification of system requirements, helping define the user model, data structure and adaptive behaviour of the system. User requirements guided the design decisions on what could be implemented by using simple adaptable triggers, and what instead needed more sophisticated adaptive techniques. This is a fundamental choice when all the computation must be done on a PDA. Graphical and interactive environments for developing and testing complex adaptive systems are discussed as a further step in an iterative design process that considers the user interaction to be the central point. This paper discusses how such an environment allows designers and developers to experiment with different system behaviours and to widely test it under realistic conditions by simulating the actual context evolving over time. The understanding gained in HyperAudio is then considered from the perspective of later developments: our findings still appers to be valid despite the time that had passed. Daniela Petrelli: The work discussed in this paper was carried out when the author was at ITC-irst in Italy.     

An integrated component design approach to the development of a design information system for customer-oriented product design

In product design, the designer must draw upon many different types of information including both product-user requirements and design developments in related fields. As each designer has his/her own subjective opinion, an appropriate link between the user requirements and design features must be carefully developed to generate the most suitable design recommendation.The objective of this research is to develop a component design approach for the generation and evaluation of feasible design alternatives to help designers make the most effective design decisions. The development of the approach is based on the concept of component design and interaction links between user requirements and design output parameter values so that the design alternatives can be generated. A confidence interval for order statistics is then used to determine if enough unique feasible design alternatives have been generated. The research is presented in conjunction with a ballpoint pen design to demonstrate the feasibility and advantages of this approach.The results should provide designers with a useful method for the development of a design information system that will efficiently generate and evaluate a set of feasible design alternatives in product design process.     

Integrated systems II: Multi-tier interfaces for integrating families of systems

Of critical importance is the design of the man-machine interfaces for general rule based systems. They must serve (i) as user-friendly interfaces for different classes of users for different applications and (ii) to invoke service components in integrated packages without interrogating users. These objectives are achieved with a multitier interface design whose two parts, the Interactive User-Friendly Interface (IUFI) and the System Interface (SI), communicate with each other via commonly used notational systems and can be invoked independently of each other. The user-friendly interface, which is uniquely designed for each user discipline, passes information to the SI. The SI does not change for new IUFI designs and it can be invoked by other rule based systems without interrogating users.Here the requirements for the IUFI and SI parts are identified, four different designs of multi-tier interfaces are given and two applications are described. Also included are guidelines for designing user friendly interfaces.     

Using task analysis to improve usability of fatigue modelling software

The design of any interactive computer system requires consideration of both humans and machines. Software usability is one aspect of human–computer interaction that can benefit from knowledge of the user and their tasks. One set of methods for determining whether an application enables users to achieve their predetermined goals effectively and efficiently is task analysis. In the present study, a task analysis was applied to the graphical user interface of fatigue modelling software used in industry. The task analysis procedure allowed areas of usability improvement to be identified and then addressed with alternate interface prototypes. The present method of task analysis illustrates a practical and efficient way for software designers to improve software usability, user effectiveness and satisfaction, by involving users in the design process.     

Cultural Cognitive Style and Web Design: Beyond a Behavioral Inquiry into Computer-Mediated Communication

Numerous studies have identified links among culture, user preferences, and Web site usability. Most of these studies were reports of findings from a behavioral perspective in explaining how cultural factors affect processes of Web-related content design and use. Based on the research of Vygotsky and Nisbett, the authors propose a broader model, referred to as "cultural cognition theory," by which Web design, like other types of information production, is seen as being shaped by cultural cognitive processes that impact the designers' cognitive style. This study explores issues related to Web designers' cultural cognitive styles and their impact on user responses. The results of an online experiment that exposed American ¹ and Chinese users to sites created by both Chinese and American designers indicate that users perform information-seeking tasks faster when using Web content created by designers from their own cultures.     

A graphical,database-querying interface for casual,naive computer users

The main thrust of this work is to present to the naive user, information on the database with which he is interacting, which will enable him to produce quickly and easily, meaningful database queries. This information is presented as a multi-level picture, and the testing performed concentrates on the presentation aspects of the picture.The characteristics of a specific group of casual, naive database users, namely doctors, were employed in the derivation of requirements for the database interface. A graphical interface, with natural language query processing, is presented as satisfying these requirements. The interface provides a picture of the logical database structure; the user can also interact with the picture in order to ascertain the types of data held by the database. An initial test was conducted with the primary purpose of validating the acceptability of the interface by the doctors. As intimated, follow-on testing considered variations to the basic picture, using both tree and network structures with differing levels of heading interrelationship information, to discover user preferences among some of the available options. These latter tests were performed with a group of doctors and a group of teachers.The results indicate that the test subjects were comfortable with the interface and it enabled them to produce database queries quickly, easily and efficiently. There was no statistically significant differences in the speed of entry or correctness of queries over the different picture variations. For the doctors, there were statistically significant results for the subjective preference of one particular picture variant among those considered; for the teachers there were indications of concurrence with the doctors' preference but not at a level that was statistically significant. There was a statistically significant rejection by the test population of pictures closely following the form of an entity-relationship diagram.     

角色模型的粗集-模糊聚类分析方法

角色分析可以满足产品个性化设计系统中对于用户模型构建的需要。提出了基于粗集的模糊聚类角色分析与模型构建方法,通过构造基于粗集的模糊相似矩阵、确定角色属性的模糊相似聚类分析方法,从用户调研数据中提取典型用户属性特征,构建角色模型。该方法完善了角色分析在产品设计中的应用方法,有助于快速生成概念产品设计模型与方案。     

Designing interfaces for the organization

Multiuser systems force interface designers to consider a web of interacting users. Our challenge is to design interfaces that help users understand not only how the application program works, but also how work within the organization itself is done. Future organizational applications thus demand that interface design goes well beyond graphical representations and interactive dialogues. We must design interfaces that make relevant organizational resources comprehensible and accessible to users     

A task-centered approach for user modeling in a hypermedia office documentation system

The development of user-adaptive systems is of increasing importance for industrial applications. User modeling emerged from the need to represent in the system knowledge about the user in order to allow informed decisions on how to adapt to match the user's needs. Most of the research in this field, however, has been theoretical, top-down. Our approach, in contrast, was driven by the needs of the application and shows features of bottom-up, user-centered design.We have implemented a user modeling component supporting a task-based interface to a hypermedia information system for hospitals and tested it under realistic conditions. A new architecture for user modeling has been developed which focuses on the tasks performed by users. It allows adaptive browsing support for users with different level of experience, and a level of adaptability. The requirements analysis shows that the differences in the information needs of users with different levels of experience are not only quantitative, but qualitative. Experienced users are not only able to cope with a wider browsing space, but sometimes prefer to organize their search in a different way. That is why the user model and the interface of the system are designed to support a smooth transition in the access options provided to novice users and to expert users.     

Graceful interaction with graphical constraints

The graphical constraint editor (GRACE), a graphical editor that lets users define graphical, or geometric, constraints, is reviewed. Graphical constraints specify relationships among graphical objects that the system must maintain. Constraints are useful in graphical drawing editors, design activities supported by CAD systems, and graphical user interface construction. GRACE provides mechanisms for explicit and implicit constraint specification using simple and natural means. These include simple direct manipulation methods and a constraints-by-demonstration facility that incorporates both novel heuristics for inferring user-demonstrated relations in an economical fashion and a natural-language explanation tool that helps the user understand the system's inferencing behavior. An overview of GRACE's user interface is presented and details about how users specify graphical relations and query the system to obtain information about them are provided     

Understanding and designing for intermediated information tasks in India

It's important to consider both primary and secondary users when designing for intermediated interaction scenarios in India and elsewhere in the developing world. However, most of this research has focused on supporting users in the developed world who are voluntarily collaborating on a computing task. Many users in India, especially those from disadvantaged classes, have only partial or no physical access to computing devices. We refer to these users as secondary users to distinguish them from the primary users that the interface design process traditionally considers. Secondary users must interact with information resources via a proxy primary user who has the required access rights and skills. The proxy's filtering and funneling decisions limit the secondary users' information-seeking behavior; the secondary user might also have an unequal power relationship with the proxy. Therefore, secondary users might never know the full scope of actions and knowledge available to them. If we are to realize the egalitarian potential of computing, we must consider secondary users in the design process. We must develop technologies that recognize the needs and aspirations of all classes of users, including those without direct access to the user interface. In fact, by designing user interfaces explicitly supporting intermediated tasks, both primary and secondary users can benefit.