The challenge of interface design for communication theory: from interaction metaphor to contexts of discovery

Those who study interface design still have not resolved the issue of whether the computer is a passive medium or a communicative participant with which we can hope to ‘engage in conversation’. The authors think that this controversy reflects an inadequate philosophy of interface design, which cannot account for what purpose a medium serves in a human communication. In a short history of humancomputer interface research, we trace the development of this philosophy through three generations of computer interface technology and find that its failure lies in the conceptual limitations of its driving concept of interaction.

Just as the concept of interaction provided the transition from the past (command-line interface) to the present (desktop metaphor interface), perhaps, the concept of engagement can provide the transition from our present understanding of the ‘interactive desktop’ interface to multimedia's ‘contexts of discovery’.

The development of multimedia gives interface designers the ultimate challenge to develop interface technology that will simulate human-to-human communication. Should human communication theory be able to treat the conceptual deficiencies of interface design philosophy? The authors find fundamental challenges here and briefly indicate what Charles S. Peirce's semiotic might offer as an age-old remedy.     

Image pre-compensation to facilitate computer access for users with refractive errors

Computer technologies, frequently employed for everyday tasks, often use Graphical User Interfaces (GUIs), presented through monitors or LCD displays. This type of visual interface is not well suited for users with refractive visual limitations, particularly when they are severe and not correctable by common means. In order to facilitate computer access for users with refractive deficiencies, an algorithm has been developed, using a priori knowledge of the visual aberration, to generate on-screen images that counter the effect of the aberration. When the user observes the screen displaying a pre-compensated image, the image perceived in the retina will be similar to the original image. The algorithm was tested by artificially introducing a spherical aberration in the field of view of 14 subjects, totaling 28 individual eyes. This use of pre-compensation improves the visual performance of the subjects with respect to that achieved with no compensation.     

A guide to agile development of interactive software with a “User Objectives”-driven methodology

This paper presents the InterMod methodology. By combining the widely accepted Agile Methods, Model-Driven Developments and User-Centred Design it allows us to develop high-quality interactive applications. As a main characteristic, it plans and organises the software project as a series of iterations that are guided by the User Objectives in an agile and user-centred manner. At each iteration, the software development work can be distributed to different teams according to some developmental and integration activities. Each activity is driven by models that are validated by a multidisciplinary team composed of developers and users. The requirements are incrementally collected and formalised by means of models based on user-centred design. Besides, the Semantically Enriched Human–Computer Interaction model is proposed to speed up project validation. This model enriches a human–computer interaction model with some visual characteristics and the application semantic. Thus, the enriched model provides enough information to generate prototypes so users and developers can easily validate this model. Diagram project is a real case study that is used to illustrate the application of the InterMod methodology through the whole paper.