Today's computer–human interfaces are typically designed with the assumption that they are going to be used by an able-bodied person, who is using a typical set of input and output devices, who has ...typical perceptual and cognitive abilities, and who is sitting in a stable, warm environment. Any deviation from these assumptions may drastically hamper the person's effectiveness—not because of any
inherent barrier to interaction, but because of a mismatch between the person's effective abilities and the assumptions underlying the interface design.
We argue that automatic personalized interface generation is a feasible and scalable solution to this challenge. We present our
Supple system, which can automatically generate interfaces adapted to a person's devices, tasks, preferences, and abilities. In this paper we formally define interface generation as an optimization problem and demonstrate that, despite a large solution space (of up to 10
17 possible interfaces), the problem is computationally feasible. In fact, for a particular class of cost functions,
Supple produces exact solutions in under a second for most cases, and in a little over a minute in the worst case encountered, thus enabling run-time generation of user interfaces. We further show how several different design criteria can be expressed in the cost function, enabling different kinds of personalization. We also demonstrate how this approach enables extensive user- and system-initiated run-time adaptations to the interfaces after they have been generated.
Supple is not intended to replace human user interface designers—instead, it offers alternative user interfaces for those people whose devices, tasks, preferences, and abilities are not sufficiently addressed by the hand-crafted designs. Indeed, the results of our study show that, compared to manufacturers' defaults, interfaces automatically generated by
Supple significantly improve speed, accuracy and satisfaction of people with motor impairments.
Journalists are increasingly concerned that offensive and banal user comments on news websites might alienate readers and damage quality perceptions. To explore such presumed effects, we investigated ...the impact of civility and reasoning (and lack thereof) in user comments on perceptions of journalistic quality. An experiment revealed that unreasoned comments decrease an article's perceived informational quality, but only in unknown news brands. Incivility in comments had an unconditionally negative effect on the perceived formal quality of an article. Neither civility nor reasoning improved the assessments of journalistic quality, as compared to a comment-free version. On the contrary, we observed a trend showing that the mere presence of comments deteriorates the perceived quality of an article.
With the development of social networking applications, microblog has turned to be an indispensable online communication network in our daily life. For microblog users, recommending high quality ...information is a demanding service. Some microblog services encourage users to annotate themselves with tags, which are used to describe their interests or attributes. However, few users are willing to create tags and available tags are not fully exploited for microblog recommendation. Besides, following/follower relationship in microblog is asymmetric, which can be used not only for communicating with friends or acquaintances but also for getting information on particular subjects. So far, there is no microblog recommendation algorithm which employs all the above mentioned information. This paper aims to investigate a joint framework to combine tag correlation and user social relation for microblog recommendation. Our approach identifies users’ interests via their personal tags and social relations. More specifically, a user tag retrieval strategy is established to add tags for users without or with few tags, and the user-tag matrix is then built and user-tag weights are then obtained. In order to solve the problem of sparsity of the matrix, both inner and outer correlation between tags are investigated to update the user-tag matrix. Considering the significance of user social relation for microblog recommendation, a user–user social relation similarity matrix is constructed. Moreover, an iterative updating scheme is developed to get the final tag-user matrix for computing the similarities between microblogs and users. We illustrate the capability of our algorithm by making experiments on real microblog datasets. Experimental results show that the algorithm is effective for microblog recommendation.
An adaptive user interface requires identification of user requirements. Interface designers and engineers must understand end-user interaction with the system to improve user interface design. A ...combination of interviews and observations is applied for user requirement analysis in health information systems (HIS). Then, user preferences are categorized in this paper as either data entry, language and vocabulary, information presentation, or help, warning and feedback. The user preferences in these categories were evaluated using the focus group method. Focus group sessions with different types of HIS users comprising medical staff (with and without computer skills) and system administrators identified each user group’s preference for the initial adaptation of the HIS user interface. User needs and requirements must be identified to adapt the interface to users during data entry into the system. System designers must understand user interactions with the system to identify their needs and preferences. Without this, interface design cannot be adapted to users and users will not be comfortable using the system and eventually abandon its use.
Fifth generation cellular networks must support dense user environments where close proximity users and highly correlated channels are prevalent. This study presents a novel decorrelating ...zero-forcing (DZF) scheme. It improves downlink zero-forcing (ZF) performance over multi-user multiple-input multiple-output channels when highly correlated users are present. DZF groups correlated users into pairs where the stronger user is labelled ‘near’ and the weaker user, ‘far’. For the far and unpaired users, the proposed design is similar to conventional ZF (CZF) in that the base station performs traditional ZF and the users employ the leading left singular vectors of the channel for processing. In contrast, the near users employ the second strongest left singular vector which decorrelates their effective channel with the paired far user. This reduces the noise inflation inherent in ZF for correlated channels. From simulations and analysis the authors demonstrate that DZF has both rate and fairness advantages over CZF when highly correlated users are present. Furthermore, they design a hybrid ZF (HZF) scheme, which harnesses the advantages of both CZF and DZF, hence providing robustness against the joint scheduling of semi-orthogonal and highly correlated users with very little additional complexity. Simulations clearly demonstrate that HZF has higher rates than CZF and DZF.
In this design study, we present IRVINE, a Visual Analytics (VA) system, which facilitates the analysis of acoustic data to detect and understand previously unknown errors in the manufacturing of ...electrical engines. In serial manufacturing processes, signatures from acoustic data provide valuable information on how the relationship between multiple produced engines serves to detect and understand previously unknown errors. To analyze such signatures, IRVINE leverages interactive clustering and data labeling techniques, allowing users to analyze clusters of engines with similar signatures, drill down to groups of engines, and select an engine of interest. Furthermore, IRVINE allows to assign labels to engines and clusters and annotate the cause of an error in the acoustic raw measurement of an engine. Since labels and annotations represent valuable knowledge, they are conserved in a knowledge database to be available for other stakeholders. We contribute a design study, where we developed IRVINE in four main iterations with engineers from a company in the automotive sector. To validate IRVINE, we conducted a field study with six domain experts. Our results suggest a high usability and usefulness of IRVINE as part of the improvement of a real-world manufacturing process. Specifically, with IRVINE domain experts were able to label and annotate produced electrical engines more than 30% faster.
The field of cyber security is faced with ever‐expanding amounts of data and a constant barrage of cyber attacks. Within this space, we have designed BubbleNet as a cyber security dashboard to help ...network analysts identify and summarize patterns within the data. This design study faced a range of interesting constraints from limited time with various expert users and working with users beyond the network analyst, such as network managers. To overcome these constraints, the design study employed a user‐centered design process and a variety of methods to incorporate user feedback throughout the design of BubbleNet. This approach resulted in a successfully evaluated dashboard with users and further deployments of these ideas in both research and operational environments. By explaining these methods and the process, it can benefit future visualization designers to help overcome similar challenges in cyber security or alternative domains.
Biologists are faced with an ever-changing array of complex software tools with steep learning curves, often run on High Performance Computing platforms. To resolve the tradeoff between analytical ...sophistication and usability, we have designed BioLegato, a programmable graphical user interface (GUI) for running external programs. BioLegato can run any program or pipeline that can be launched as a command. BioLegato reads specifications for each tool from files written in PCD, a simple language for specifying GUI components that set parameters for calling external programs. Thus, adding new tools to BioLegato can be done without changing the BioLegato Java code itself. The process is as simple as copying an existing PCD file and modifying it for the new program, which is more like filling in a form than writing code. PCD thus facilitates rapid development of new applications using existing programs as building blocks, and getting them to work together seamlessly. BioLegato applies Object-Oriented concepts to the user experience by organizing applications based on discrete data types and the methods relevant to that data. PCD makes it easier for BioLegato applications to evolve with the succession of analytical tools for bioinformatics. BioLegato is applicable not only in biology, but in almost any field in which disparate software tools need to work as an integrated system.
During the design, it is important to evaluate the user experience of representative users in many human product interactions. But, in some cases, it is difficult or even impossible to recruit ...representative users because they have disabilities that do not allow them to take part in such investigations. Thus, alternative populations are widely studied. The most common way to replace real blind people is to use sighted but blindfolded users when studying design solutions. To test whether such alternative or proxy users can be used to represent blind people in social interactions, we examined the communication quality of 20 blind-sighted pairs and 20 blindfolded-sighted pairs in two different experiments. A prototype named E-Gaze glasses was evaluated as the testing tool. Results clearly show that the blindfolded participants achieved significantly higher communication quality than the blind participants. In qualitative data analysis, the blindfolded participants also reported their user experience of being blindfolded in conversations. Our qualitative results strengthen the conclusion that blindfolded users' behaviour is different from real blind users' behaviour. We recommend that blind users should not be substituted for blindfolded users in human product evaluations when communication quality is measured.
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