Intelligent adaptive assistance and its automatic generation

ACM Trans. Comput.-Hum. Interact.

Cairns

Jones

2001

Self Cite

How hard do users find interactive devices to use to achieve their goals, and how can we get this information early enough to influence design? We show that Markov modeling can obtain suitable measures, and we provide formulas that can be used for a large class of systems. We analyze and consider alternative designs for various real examples. We introduce a "knowledge/usability graph," which shows the impact of even a small amount of knowledge for the user, and the extent to which designers' knowledge may bias their views of usability. Markov models can be built into design tools, and can therefore be made very convenient for designers to utilize. One would hope that in the future, design tools would include such mathematical analysis, and no new design skills would be required to evaluate devices. A particular concern of this paper is to make the approach accessible. Complete program code and all the underlying mathematics are provided in appendices to enable others to replicate and test all results shown.

Section: Further Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

Usability analysis with Markov models

ACM Trans. Comput.-Hum. Interact.

Cairns

Jones

2001

Self Cite

“…questions such as, "I pressed something, but I expected such-and-such; what should I have done ?" Thimbleby and Addison [9] discuss how to supply answers to such "intelligent help" questions. We can use the help function to generate an entire user manual.…”

Section: Automatic (And Hence Correct) Helpmentioning

confidence: 99%

Specification-led design for interface simulation. Collecting use-data, interactive help, writing manuals, analysis, comparing alternative designs, etc.

1998

Personal Technologies

Self Cite

This paper shows how to combine a substantial part of the product development cycie of interactive devices into a single, coordinated approach. Much can be derived automatically from a suitable specification of the interactive device. Normal product development has a device specified and buik, then has its manuals written, then it is used and tested. At this late stage design problems may be identified, but it is now too late: usability studies become academic in so far as the particular product is concerned, since it is already effectiveiy in production. It would be better if the testing and manual writing could rapidly be obtained from the initial specification, before any investment has been made in fabrication. This paper offers a design approach that achieves this, and it shows how the various views of the design can be used to help improve each other; for instance, the automatically generated user manual can be fed back to suggest improvements in the design. A microwave cooker is used as a real example. This paper provides full and unabridged details of everything it discusses by using Mathematica as a rapid prototyping environment. Any similar device can be analysed in the same way, directly from the paper (which is available on the World Wide Web).

“…In rigorous HCI, one needs a programming framework that is both analytic and close to the user interface, if not identical with it: graphs achieve this goal. Graph theory was proposed for use in HCI in [13,14] as a means of analysis; other work includes using graph theory for providing interactive intelligent help [18], and using flowgraph concepts to analyse user manuals as structured programs [17].…”

Section: Graph-based Approachesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Applying Graph Theory to Interaction Design

Engineering Interactive Systems

Gow

2008

Self Cite

Abstract. Graph theory provides a substantial resource for a diverse range of quantitative and qualitative usability measures that can be used for evaluating recovery from error, informing design tradeoffs, probing topics for user training, and so on.Graph theory is a straight-forward, practical and flexible way to implement real interactive systems. Hence, graph theory complements other approaches to formal HCI, such as theorem proving and model checking, which have a less direct relation to interaction. This paper gives concrete examples based on the analysis of a real non-trivial interactive device, a medical syringe pump, itself modelled as a graph. New ideas to HCI (such as small world graphs) are introduced, which may stimulate further research.