HCI2003: Good Incremental Science sees Improved Tools for Interaction

Paul Cairns reports on a session on Interactive Design that took place Friday morning at HCI2003:

Though this was a normal paper session of two long papers and two short, this session was somewhat unusual in that there were only two speakers. The first three papers were all work that Andy Cockburn of University of Canterbury, Christchurch, NZ, had done in collaboration with his students. Understandably, the students had not been able to attend and so it was left to Andy to give all the presentations. Marie-Luce Bourguet, Queen Mary, University of London, had the unenviable job of rounding off the Andy Cockburn experience.

The clear theme of the session was improving well-known forms of interaction such as multi-modal interaction and scrolling. Despite only two speakers, the talks covered a good variety of topics. In his first talk, Andy looked at improving mouse acquisition of small targets. Fitt's Law featured heavily as he compared several previously proposed methods for improving acquisition speeds such as sticky targets or expanding targets, familiar to those of you with the new MacOSX application bar. His second talk looked at a new way of scrolling that combined zooming and scrolling so that the faster you scrolled the more of the document you saw. This is not a new idea, indeed it was used to good effect in the game Grand Theft Auto, and it has been the subject of an earlier study in a more academic context. Andy's contribution was to make a robust implementation evaluated on ecologically valid tasks. His final paper looked at new layout for buttons on a mobile phone to improve SMS entrty. Oddly for a phone, it had no numbers for buttons but instead had 52 buttons for the letters. Each numbers was in a space between four buttons and entered as a chording combination of the surrounding letters.

What made these papers valuable were that the innovations were all evaluated with well formulated, multi-factor experiments and analysed with appropriate statistics (though I would have liked to have seen proper follow up tests to the ANOVAs). Each innovation did seem to bring about significant improvements across a range of realistic tasks and in comparison to the more standard alternatives. Even so, Andy made measured conclusions and was well aware of the need for follow up, integrating work.

In contrast, Marie-Luce was analysing more theoretically how to disambiguate multi-modal input, specifically a combination of speech and mouse gestures. The core of her system was a finite state machine (FSM) model, though actually, may have been better desribed as a non-deterministic automata, in order to allow for delayed assessment of initially ambiguous sequences. Based on this, Marie-Luce had built a set of tools to simplify construction of multi-modal interfaces, the FSMs and to make it quick and easy to alter the interface. I recommend the paper to you as a nice piece of analysis. The value of the toolkit is now in the hands of multi-modal developers.

This session then was one of good incremental science to improve known interaction techniques. The charismatic HCI 2003 keynote speaker Hiroshi Ishii acknowledged the value of such work even when there are sexier and more glamorous topics in HCI.

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