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Education and self-improvement are key features of human behavior. However, learning in the physical world is not always desirable or achievable. That is how simulators came to be. There are domains where purely virtual simulators can be created in contrast to physical ones. In this research we present a novel environment for learning, using a natural user interface. We, humans, are not designed to operate and manipulate objects via keyboard, mouse or a controller. The natural way of interaction and communication is achieved through our actuators (hands and feet) and our sensors (hearing, vision, touch, smell and taste). That is the reason why it makes more sense to use sensors that can track our skeletal movements, are able to estimate our pose, and interpret our gestures. After acquiring and processing the desired – natural input, a system can analyze and translate those gestures into movement signals.

This work revisits established user classifications and aims to characterise a historically unspecified user category, the Occasional User (OU). Three user categories, novice, intermediate and expert, have dominated the work of user interface (UI) designers, researchers and educators for decades. These categories were created to conceptualise user's needs, strategies and goals around the 80s. Since then, UI paradigm shifts, such as direct manipulation and touch, along with other advances in technology, gave new access to people with little computer knowledge. This fact produced a diversification of the existing user categories not observed in the literature review of traditional classification of users. The findings of this work include a new characterisation of the occasional user, distinguished by user's uncertainty of repetitive use of an interface and little knowledge about its functioning. In addition, the specification of the OU, together with principles and recommendations will help UI community to informatively design for users without requiring a prospective use and previous knowledge of the UI. The OU is an essential type of user to apply user-centred design approach to understand the interaction with technology as universal, accessible and transparent for the user, independently of accumulated experience and technological era that users live in. Significance of user classification for the design of interactive systems.Analysis of user classifications, identifying common definition parameters.Notification of the absence of the Occasional User in previous classifications.Presentation of specific parameters and examples of Occasional Users.Enumeration of main implications of the Occasional User in user interface design.

Nowadays, Augmented-Reality (AR) head-mounted displays (HMD) deliver a more immersive visualization of virtual contents, but the available means of interaction, mainly based on gesture and/or voice, are yet limited and obviously lack realism and expressivity when compared to traditional physical means. In this sense, the integration of haptics within AR may help to deliver an enriched experience, while facilitating the performance of specific actions, such as repositioning or resizing tasks, that are still dependent on the user&rsquo, s skills. In this direction, this paper gathers the description of a flexible architecture designed to deploy haptically enabled AR applications both for mobile and wearable visualization devices. The haptic feedback may be generated through a variety of devices (e.g., wearable, graspable, or mid-air ones), and the architecture facilitates handling the specificity of each. For this reason, within the paper, it is discussed how to generate a haptic representation of a 3D digital object depending on the application and the target device. Additionally, the paper includes an analysis of practical, relevant issues that arise when setting up a system to work with specific devices like HMD (e.g., HoloLens) and mid-air haptic devices (e.g., Ultrahaptics), such as the alignment between the real world and the virtual one. The architecture applicability is demonstrated through the implementation of two applications: (a) Form Inspector and (b) Simon Game, built for HoloLens and iOS mobile phones for visualization and for UHK for mid-air haptics delivery. These applications have been used to explore with nine users the efficiency, meaningfulness, and usefulness of mid-air haptics for form perception, object resizing, and push interaction tasks. Results show that, although mobile interaction is preferred when this option is available, haptics turn out to be more meaningful in identifying shapes when compared to what users initially expect and in contributing to the execution of resizing tasks. Moreover, this preliminary user study reveals some design issues when working with haptic AR. For example, users may be expecting a tailored interface metaphor, not necessarily inspired in natural interaction. This has been the case of our proposal of virtual pressable buttons, built mimicking real buttons by using haptics, but differently interpreted by the study participants.

Nowadays, touchable displays are widely used in most embedded systems, including mobile phones and other hand-held devices. Although interactive user interfaces are intuitively required for these systems, most of interactive graphical user interface implementations usually need lots of system resources. For low-tier embedded systems, we have presented that the text-based user interfaces are more suitable, as shown in our previous works. In this paper, we present an object-oriented approach to provide a full-scale text-based user interface scheme, especially on the low-tier embedded systems. Our application user interface implementation is very simple and intuitive, with few amount of computing resource. It naturally supports multiple overlapping windows, pop-up menus, pull-down menus, dialog boxes, and other user interface components, with graceful object-oriented application programming interfaces. We also provide large size text output for emphasis purposes. All the systems are now available as a software library, and can be used for wide range of applications.

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.

International audience; The considerable and significant progress achieved in the design and development of new interaction devices between man and machine has enabled the emergence of various powerful and efficient input and/or output devices. Each of these new devices brings specific interaction modes.With the emergence of these devices, new interaction techniques and modes arise and new interaction capabilities are offered. New user interfaces need to be designed or former ones need to evolve. The design of so called plastic user interfaces contributes to handling such evolutions. The key requirement for the design of such a user interface is that the new obtained user interface shall be adapted to the application and have, at least, the same behavior as the previous (adapted) one. This paper proposes to address the problem of user interface evolution due to the introduction of new interaction devices and/or new interaction modes. More, precisely, we are interested by the study of the design process of a user interface resulting from the evolution of a former user interface due to the introduction of new devices and/or new interaction capabilities. We consider that interface behaviors are described by labelled transition systems and comparison between user interfaces is handled by an extended definition of the bi-simulation relationship to compare user interface behaviors when interaction modes are replaced by new ones.

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to describe an experimental study to reduce cognitive load and enhance usability for interactive geometry software. Design/methodology/approachThe Graphical User Interface is the main mechanism of communication between user and system features. Educational software interfaces should provide useful features to assist learners without generate extra cognitive load. In this context, this research aims at analyzing a reduced and a complete interface of interactive geometry software, and verifies the educational benefits they provide. We investigated whether a reduced interface makes few cognitive demands of users in comparison to a complete interface. To this end, we designed the interfaces and carried out an experiment involving 69 undergraduate students. FindingsThe experimental results indicate that an interface that hides advanced and extraneous features helps novice users to perform slightly better than novice users using a complete interface. After receiving proper training, however, a complete interface makes users more productive than a reduced interface. Originality/valueIn educational software, successful user interface designs minimize the cognitive load on users; thereby users can direct their efforts to maximizing their understanding of the educational concepts being presented. We investigated whether a reduced interface of an interactive geometry software helps to increase students' performance.We designed 60 tasks to be completed with two different interfaces, a complete and a reduced version, for the same software.We carried out an experiment involving 69 undergraduate students, randomly assigned to one of the interfaces.The experimental results indicate that the reduced interface helps novice users to perform slightly better.After receiving proper training, however, a complete interface makes users more productive using a complete interface.

Interface theory asserts that neither our perceptual experience of the world nor the scientific constructs used to describe the world are veridical. The primary argument used to uphold this claim is that (1) evolution is driven by a process of natural selection that favors fitness over veridicality, and (2) payoffs do not vary monotonically with truth. I argue that both the arguments used to bolster this claim and the conclusions derived from it are flawed. Interface theory assumes that perception evolved to directly track fitness but fails to consider the role of adaptation on ontogenetic time scales. I argue that the ubiquity of nonmonotonic payoff functions requires that (1) perception tracks "truth" for species that adapt on ontogenetic time scales and (2) that perception should be distinct from utility. These conditions are required to pursue an adaptive strategy to mitigate homeostatic imbalances. I also discuss issues with the interface metaphor, the particular formulation of veridicality that is considered, and the relationship of interface theory to the history of ideas on these topics.

The adaptation of the user interface is present in several areas, reaching to embrace virtual learning environments. One possible source of adaptation could be based on the student's cultural profile. People from different countries have different cultures and interact with the user interface differently, prefer different graphic designs, and have different expectations and behavior patterns. Therefore, the user interface should be adapted to the needs of each geographical location to provide optimal user experience. This paper presents a preliminary adapting model for interface according to the cultural profile of the user / student, specifically in a ubiquitous environment for collaborative learning.

In this work, we proposed a virtual companion based interface that simplifies the smartphone interface for the elderly. This interface displays menus according to the situation and users' request via a virtual agent and animates information in a 3-dimensional manner. We applied speech recognition technology from mobile and wearable devices to receive input from users. Virtual avatars were selected to visualize appropriate behavior based on user input. We expect that this mobile interface could be a future of next smartphone user interface.

Interface metaphors are often used in Human Computer Interaction (HCI) to exploit knowledge that users already have from other domains. A commonly used one in Digital Musical Instruments (DMIs) is the conductor metaphor. We theorize that part of the knowledge that users have from the domain that the interface metaphor replicates is user-specific. In this context, we argue that systems using an interface metaphor can see their usability improved by adapting to this user-specific knowledge. We propose strategies to design motion-sound mappings for DMIs that draw upon the conductor metaphor by adapting to personal nuances that can be automatically computed from spontaneous conducting movements. In addition to the above, we study the potential of the conductor metaphor in a gaming context as a mean to raise interest for classical music. These contributions are complemented by the data collected in all observational studies, which is made publicly available to the community, Las metáforas de interfaz se utilizan habitualmente en la interacción persona-ordenador para explotar el conocimiento que los usuarios tienen de otros dominios. Una comúnmente utilizada en instrumentos musicales digitales (DMIs) es la metáfora del director. Argumentamos que parte del conocimiento que los usuarios tienen del dominio que la metáfora replica es específico de cada usuario. En este contexto, proponemos que sistemas que hacen uso de metáforas de interfaz pueden mejorar su usabilidad adaptándose a este conocimiento específico. Implementamos estrategias para diseñar mapeos entre movimiento y sonido para DMIs basados en la metáfora del director, mediante la adaptación a matices personales que pueden ser automaticamente extraídos analizando movimientos de dirección espontáneos. Además, estudiamos el potencial de la metáfora del director en un contexto de juego, como medio para incrementar el interés por la música clásica. Estas contribuciones se complementan con los datos recopilados en los estudios observacionales, que se ponen a disposicion pública para la comunidad.

This study presents a content control application usage on smartphones which can improve collaboration between children and parents. The importance of the parents' role is to provide a comprehension regarding the content of the application to children will make good communications between parents and children. So, the children can think and make decisions on something that they face. Parental control application is made to control and limit the use of applications on smartphones by children. But the existing application has a problem on the user interface. They designed just only show the same features that the application block by the parents and are not designed to involve children in the process of selecting applications. Thus, the chance of parents to help children understand the contents of the application could possibly be missed. Because the user interface is closely related to the tasks performed by users, the user interface has a role in a parental control application design. To build a good parental control application, it is necessary convenience when a user interacts with the application system. This is a consideration in this study that focused on the user interface. Design methods that will be used in designing the user interface is User Centered Design (UCD). UCD is a method in designing user interface design with a focus on what the user needs. This method will help research to provide user data that parents and children directly, so the search process more accurate data is obtained. UCD has a life cycle stage design, so the design is made to be better. The result of this research is obtained parental control application user interfaces that provide children's freedom in choosing the content of applications and needs of parents in educating children regarding the content of the application being used so parents can educate a child.

English lexicography has a long and rich tradition. The digitization of the field has revolutionized it in many respects. However, from a designer point of view, this transformation is not complete. In fact, if we were to examine the layouts and arrangements of online dictionaries, we would find that they share an almost identical structure with the printed form.Today, lexicography is again at a turning point. New research states that dictionaries should mirror the way language is organized in our brains. That is, lexicographers should partake in cognitive research and implement the findings in the process of dictionary-making.The primary goal of LangWidgets is to approach this task through the user-interface perspective. Mindfully-crafted eLexicon interfaces could ease the cognitive load of users by simplifying navigation through the debris of data. In addition, they could promote a more precise mental model of the language, which, in turn, would improve the process of language acquisition. The paper concludes with a pilot study demonstrating the future promise of the LangWidgets system.

The adaptability of a web application is its ability to react depending on the needs and the preferences of users. Thus, user models, used by such adaptive user interface, contain personal information which is required for learning personalized process. Then, evaluation of web applications interests on how users can learn to achieve their objectives. To gather this information a variety of measures have been used. In this paper, we investigate and present our adaptive Web interface using a Bayesian networks approach and we give a special importance to the evaluation of this web interface. The experiments show that the adaptive Web interface provides results that satisfy the user. We confirmed that the adaptive user interface was more comfortable for use than the fixed user interface.

Users from different cultures might have different expectations when engaging with interface design of a website. It is assumed that every person is influenced by his or her culture stated that, perceptions, preferences, communications and social acceptance are subject to culture. A slow interaction between users and user interface is one of the problem occur due to lack of limited standard of web object and users' expectation. In addition, limited standard of web object makes the User Interface Design complex and complicated. A guideline has been proposed for user interface design for e-learning website based on localization of web objects. The proposed guideline has been used in this research to redesign an existing e-learning website of Universiti Malaysia Sabah, namely Smart2ums and user interaction with the adapted user interface has been evaluated through simulation tool, namely Camtasia Studio. This research proven that adapted interface design with guideline of localization more efficient compared to interface design without adapted guideline.

Providing personalized services customized to users' needs and preferences becomes highlighted as a key area of user-context computing. It is essential for context-aware technology to be developed more intelligent and meaningful services by being widely applied to a variety of sectors and domains. SDO (Standard Development Organization) such as MPEG and W3C has been actively developed to be standardized services and to improve context-awareness services. Yet current standards related to context-aware technology, such as MPEG-7, MPEG-21, MPEG-V, and emotionML, are not capable enough to support various systems and diverse services. Against this backdrop, the MPEG User Description, referred to also as MPEG-UD Standard, is to ensure interoperability among recommendation services, which take into account user’s context when generating recommendations to users. In this light, we introduce standards related to the user context and propose the structure for RD-Engine and the Remote Responsive User Interface(RRUI) system in reference to MPEG-UD. This system collects unit resources matching specific condition according to the user’s contexts described by MPEG-UD. In so doing, it improves adaptive user interface considering device features in real-time. By automatically generating adaptive user interfaces tailored to an individual’s contexts, the proposed system aims to achieve high-quality user experience for a complex service. ☞ keyword : Context, User Interface, Context-Awareness

The authors present a brief survey on the evolution of user interface (UI) development technology, especially over the past two decades, shaped by the desktop, Web, and mobile eras. From the technology mainstream, the authors describe form-oriented, template-based, object-oriented, hybrid, and declarative frameworks and address model-driven and generic approaches. The focus of this article is on a framework of UI development concerns and how these have been addressed in each analyzed technology or group of technologies. At the end, the authors summarize current issues and future directions of UI development in general.

Modern home theater systems require users to control various devices simultaneously including a TV, audio equipment, DVD and video players, and a receiver. To perform the requested user functions in this situation, the user is required to know the functions and positions of the buttons on several remote controls. Users will become more confused if a ubiquitous home environment, which contains many mobile and stationary control devices, is realized. Therefore, the user interface should be adaptable for requested user functions and to fit a specific control device. This paper presents a context-adaptive user interface for the control of devices in ubiquitous home environment. First, we modeled the ubiquitous home environment in order to implement the context-adaptive user interface. We used a Bayesian network to predict the necessary devices in each situation and used a behavior network to select the functions that constitute an adaptive user interface in several conditions. The selected functions were used to generate an adaptive interface for each controller using a presentation template. In this paper, we implemented a ubiquitous home environment and generated a controller usage log for this environment. We confirmed that the Bayesian network effectively predicted the user requirements by evaluating the inferred results of the necessary devices based on several scenarios. Finally, we compared the adaptive user interface with the fixed user interface by surveying fourteen subjects. We confirmed that the generated adaptive user interface was more comfortable for use with typical tasks than was the fixed user interface.

To promote more interactive and dynamic machine learning, we revisit the notion of user-interface metaphors. User-interface metaphors provide intuitive constructs for supporting user needs through interface design elements. A user-interface metaphor provides a visual or action pattern that leverages a user’s knowledge of another domain. Metaphors suggest both the visual representations that should be used in a display as well as the interactions that should be afforded to the user. We argue that user-interface metaphors can also offer a method of extracting interaction-based user feedback for use in machine learning. Metaphors offer indirect, context-based information that can be used in addition to explicit user inputs, such as user-provided labels. Implicit information from user interactions with metaphors can augment explicit user input for active learning paradigms. Or it might be leveraged in systems where explicit user inputs are more challenging to obtain. Each interaction with the metaphor provides an opportunity to gather data and learn. We argue this approach is especially important in streaming applications, where we desire machine learning systems that can adapt to dynamic, changing data.

Model-based methodologies, supported by automatic generation, have been proposed as a solution to reduce software development costs. In the case of interactive computing systems specific challenges arise. On the one hand, a high level of automation requires the use of detailed models, which is contrary to the iterative development process, based on the progressive refinement of user interface mockups, typical of user centered development processes. On the other hand, layered software architectures imply a distinction between the models used in the business logic and in the user interface, raising consistency problems between the models at each level. This article proposes a tool supported approach to user interface generation directly from the architectural models of the business logic. In many situations, user interfaces provide similar features inside a specific domain. The identification of the application domain is thus a key factor in supporting the automation of the generation process., This work was financed by the ERDF – European Regional Development Fund through the Operational Programme for Competitiveness and Internationalisation - COMPETE 2020 Programme, and by National Funds through the FCT – Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia (Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology) within project POCI-01-0145- FEDER-006961., info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersion

Flip the pages back to Chapter 1. In the first pages, you see what it would be like to have a conversation with an intelligent computer regarding a live football (soccer) match. Let’s take it a step further: it's pretty reasonable to order food while watching your favorite team in action.

Interaction with the machines and computers is achieved using user interfaces. Nowadays, with the tremendous growth of technology, the interaction is made more simple and flexible. The study of user interfaces for human-computers and machines interaction is the main focus of this paper. In particular, an extensive overview of different user interfaces available so far is provided. The review covers text-based, graphical-based, and new class of emerging user interfaces to interact with the machines and computers. This work will be helpful for the development of new user interfaces.

In model-driven user interface development, several models are used to describe different aspects of user interface when level of detail varies. The relations between the models are established through model transformations. The Model Driven Engineering (MDE) approach has been proposed in software engineering domain in order to provide techniques and tools to deal with models in the automated way. In this paper, we will review existing user interface languages that gain wider acceptance, and discuss their applicability for model-driven user interface development.

This paper presents an experimental system to support a two-step User-Interface (UI) design method. The semantic user interface may be useful for research and student training of issues related to the user interface by focusing on some cognitive ergonomic aspects of UI usage.

This study examines the moderating effect of user experience on user resistance in the voice interface of in-vehicle infotainment (IVI) systems.Switching costs and perceived value affect user resistance to change.User experience positively moderates the relationship of uncertainty costs with user resistance.The findings are relevant to understanding platform and standards competition. This study examines the effects of user experience on user resistance to change-particularly, on the relationship between user resistance to change and its antecedents (i.e. switching costs and perceived value) in the context of the voice user interface of an in-vehicle infotainment (IVI) system. This research offers several salient findings. First, it shows that user experience positively moderates the relationship between uncertainty costs (one type of switching cost) and user resistance. It also negatively moderates the association between perceived value and user resistance. Second, the research test results demonstrate that users with a high degree of prior experience with the voice user interface of other smart devices exhibit low user resistance to change to the voice user interface in an IVI system. Third, we show that three types of switching costs (transition costs, in particular) may directly influence users to resist a change to the voice user interface. Fourth, our test results empirically demonstrate that both switching costs and perceived value affect user resistance to change in the context of an IVI system, which differs from the traditional IS research setting (i.e. enterprise systems). These findings may guide not only platform leaders in designing user interfaces, user experiences, and marketing strategies, but also firms that want to defend themselves from platform envelopment while devising defensive strategies in platform and standards competition.

Privacy in mobile applications is an important topic, especially when it concerns applications that gather and process health data. Using MyFitnessPal as an example eHealth app, we analyze how privacy-aware its user interface is, i.e. how well users are informed about privacy and how much control they have. We find several issues with the current interface and develop five design ideas that make the interface more privacy-aware. In a small pilot user study, we find that most of the design ideas seem to work well and enhance end users' understanding and awareness of privacy.

In today's template-driven environment of website design it is a challenge to teach students the concept of metaphor production for visual interfaces and inspire them to explore the inherent creative potential of screen-based media. This poster showcases student work from an introductory web design course project created to encourage students to think of a web space, interface, and typography in terms of metaphor. To this end, students produced small websites using text from Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities in efforts to form visual metaphors of the text's content based on their own novel subjective interpretations. The value of this assignment is in its alternative approach to teaching introductory web and interface design.

In a world where business and life revolves around internet and computers, the quality of user-computer interfaces became very important. Designs of user interface become the utmost important issue since users, -which also happen to be customers-judge quality of a product by the ease of use of the product. Selection of menu language, placement of icons, buttons all contribute to the ease and intuitive nature of the interface which eventually determine the success of the software. With all this importance riding on the user quality, there needs to be an objective way of measuring quality of user interface. In this study we have developed an automatic assessment mechanism which predicts the quality of user interface by simply observing the behavior of the user while doing transactions with the computer. The index generated through this process is a relative value which can be used for comparing quality of similar software interfaces.