CSC4212 {HUMAN COMPUTER INTERFACE}

HASSAN ABDULLAHI ALHASSAN

UG16/COMS/1059

ABSTRACT

A current topic of Human-Computer Interaction focuses on understanding and

assessing user-centered design taking into account certain psychological factors
related to users’ thought processes, feelings and behavior into account. In
particular, personality is an idiosyncratic psychological construct that captures
many of such aspects from a user. It allows designers to provide a better user
experience by adapting a user interface to individual characteristics. This review
presents the impact of design and aesthetics on user preferences, namely
considering whether certain personality traits have a preference for specific
interface design features. This review also discusses the implications of
personality-based user interface design, before moving on to the presentation of
several research projects focused on adapted design for personality types. Finally,
the review highlights trends and future directions in this domain, with particular
emphasis on brain-computer interfaces.

Designing and developing chatbots as a new interface to provide Health

information for young people needs a new understanding of new user needs and
motivations, as well as privacy. What is needed to develop a successful
conversational interface based on chatbots to provide health information is not
straightforward. The use of chatbots as conversational user interfaces means a
dramatic shift in how we are used to thinking about young users, communication
and information. In this paper, we have outlined some of the new needs and
challenges posed by the emergent trend of chatbots in the context of young people
and mental health information, as well as the new benefits that chatbots deliver.
Recently, commercial Voice User Interfaces (VUIs) have been introduced to the
market (e.g. Amazon Echo and Google Home). Although they have drawn much
attention from users, little is known about their usability, user experiences, and
usefulness. In this study, we conducted a web-based survey to investigate usability,
user experiences, and usefulness of the Google Home smart speaker. A total of 114
users, who are active in a social-media based interest group, participated in the
study. The findings show that the Google Home is usable and user-friendly for
users, and shows the potential for international users. Based on the users' feedback,
we identified the challenges encountered by the participants. The findings from
this study can be insightful for researchers and developers to take into account for
future research in VUI. Autism is a rapidly growing problem all over the world.
But in the developing countries like Bangladesh, the technological support for
Autism is not adequate. The acutest problems children with autism faces are the
communication problem. An Android app was developed to meet these needs of
the children with autism. Study on the user feedbacks of the survey conducted
about the review of the app suggested a very important integration to the app. The
process of learning through the app can be made much more efficient by involving
the parents of the autism personnel. The emotional attachment towards parents is a
great fulcrum to teach autism personnel. This paper gives an overview of the
development of the Android App and the integrated part of reinforcement based
learning. To let the parents, aid the learning process, we have kept options for them
to customize the app contents. Within the group of individuals with ASD there are
a number of people who interact well with the new technologies, which makes
them the main beneficiaries of this project. The project described in this paper
consists of designing and implementing a multimedia application within the
framework of Serious Games. The main aim is to create a system composed of a
set of Serious Games oriented to first aid education: what to do in certain
situations, basic knowledge about healthcare, medical specialties... all employing
the use of new technologies such as the Android operating system implemented on
mobile phones or tablets. Not only technological results have been analyzed, but
the opinions of users and specialists taking part in the application's validation and
initial testing have also been taken into account. Recent years we have witnessed
major advancements in technologies that support the children that have been
diagnosed with the autism by the increasing number of the application to enhance
their ability in communication, understanding and interface with others.

A basic goal of HCI is to improve the interaction between users and computers by
making computers more user-friendly and receptive to users’ needs with
appropriate functions and capabilities. UID and HCI are closely related as the
former will definitely facilitate the latter as interaction between users and
computers occurs at the user-interface. Te’eni and Sani-Kuperberg (2005) pointed
out that some design attributes are more important to functionality while other
design attributes are more relevant to system support. System characteristics are,
therefore, recognized as a crucial aspect that affects users’ continuance in the use
of a system (Hong, Thong, Wong, & Tam, 2002). Many user-interface features of
an information system such as menus, icons and touch screens are specifically
intended to enhance the usefulness and ease of use of different functions of the
system. For example, the Windows operating system embeds an interface that
makes the personal computer so much functional and so easy to use. Lacking of
either usefulness or ease of use will render a technology failure. In line with these
arguments, we propose, as indicated in Fig. 1, that the perceived user-interface
design (PUID) of a technology, being a fundamental antecedent of technology
acceptance and usage. While past studies on user-interface design focused on a
particular system or application using the experimental approach, we propose a
theoretical model to assess the impact of perceived user-interface design (PUID)
on continued usage intention (CUI) of self-paced e-learning tools in general. We
argue that the impact of PUID is mediated by two variables, namely perceived
functionality (PF) and perceived system support (PSS), which influence perceived
usefulness (PU) and perceived ease of use (PEOU), respectively. We empirically
validated the model using data collected from a survey administered to university
students in Hong Kong. We found that most hypotheses are valid and PUID is an
important antecedent of CUI of a self-paced e-learning tool. We also showed that
PU and user satisfaction (USat) are two essential predictors of CUI. However, the
impact of PEOU on CUI is indirect via PU as a mediator. Our findings enrich the
theory on the continued usage of technology, and provide e-learning developers
with managerial insights on how to entice learners to continue using their e-
learning tools.

INTRODUCTION

App features are one of the most important factors that people consider when
choosing apps. In order to satisfy users’ needs and attract their eyes, deciding what
features should be added in next release becomes very important. Different from
traditional requirement elimination, app stores provide a new platform for
developers to gather requirements and perform market-wide analysis. Considering
that software features provided to users can be found out by exploring existing
apps, an important way to elicit requirements is analyzing existing features
provided by products which offer related functions and then finding new trends
and fashions promptly. In this context, we propose a data-driven approach for
recommending software features of mobile applications based on user interface
comparison. Our approach mines similar user interfaces (UIs) from publicly
available online repository. To calculate UI similarity through the best matches of
components of two UIs, text similarity is used to measure the similarity of UI
components and genetic algorithm is introduced to improve the comparison
efficiency. Then, we develop an algorithm to extract features from similar UIs
based on a set of identification rules. These features are further clustered with text
similarity algorithm and finally recommended to developers. The approach is
empirically validated with 44 features from 10 UIs. The experiment results indicate
that our recommended features are valuable for requirement elicitation.

Interactive Machine Learning (IML) seeks to complement human perception and

intelligence by tightly integrating these strengths with the computational power
and speed of computers. The interactive process is designed to involve input from
the user but does not require the background knowledge or experience that might
be necessary to work with more traditional machine learning techniques. Under the
IML process, non-experts can apply their domain knowledge and insight over
otherwise unwieldy datasets to find patterns of interest or develop complex data-
driven applications. This process is co-adaptive in nature and relies on careful
management of the interaction between human and machine. User interface design
is fundamental to the success of this approach, yet there is a lack of consolidated
principles on how such an interface should be implemented. This article presents a
detailed review and characterisation of Interactive Machine Learning from an
interactive systems perspective. We propose and describe a structural and
behavioural model of a generalised IML system and identify solution principles for
building effective interfaces for IML. Where possible, these emergent solution
principles are contextualised by reference to the broader human-computer
interaction literature. Finally, we identify strands of user interface research key to
unlocking more efficient and productive non-expert interactive machine learning
applications.

BODY

One of the recent trends in computer input is to utilize users' natural bimanual
motor skills. This article further explores the potential benefits of such two-handed
input. We have observed that bimanual manipulation may bring two types of
advantages to human-computer interaction: manual and cognitive. Manual benefits
come from increased time-motion efficiency, due to the twice as many degrees of
freedom simultaneously available to the user. Cognitive benefits arise as a result of
reducing the load of mentally composing and visualizing the task at an unnaturally
low level which is imposed by traditional unimanual techniques. Area sweeping
was selected as our experimental task. It is representative of what one encounters,
for example, when sweeping out the bounding box surrounding a set of objects in a
graphics program. Such tasks cannot be modeled by Fitts' Law alone and have not
been previously studied in the literature. In our experiments, two bimanual
techniques were compared with the conventional one-handed GUI approach. Both
bimanual techniques employed the two-handed “stretchy” technique first
demonstrated by Krueger in 1983. We also incorporated the “Toolglass” technique
introduced by Bier et al. in 1993. Overall, the bimanual techniques resulted in
significantly faster performance than the status quo one-handed technique, and
these benefits increased with the difficulty of mentally visualizing the task,
supporting our bimanual cognitive advantage hypothesis. There was no significant
difference between the two bimanual techniques. This study makes two types of
contributions to the literature. First, practically we studied yet another class of
transaction where significant benefits can be realized by applying bimanual
techniques. Furthermore, we have done so using easily available commercial
hardware in the context to our understanding of why bimanual interaction
techniques have an advantage over unimanual techniques. A literature review on
two-handed computer input and some of the relevant bimanual human mototr
control studies is also included. Globally, there are numerous mentoring
programmes, which aim to mentor entrepreneurs and craftworkers in emerging
economies, and provide assistance and training in the development of their
businesses. As one of the biggest employers of women in emerging economies, the
craftwork industry is valued at over $32 billion, and provides further benefits to
entrepreneurs, such as a greater sense of support within communities, as well as
sustainable employment (Nest 2018). Continuous training and mentoring is
required to be able to coach these entrepreneurs, however, this training is not
sustainable in a face-to-face format due to the resources involved. In order to
maintain a constant level of mentoring, this requires the development of a digital
channel through which this training can be continued remotely.

A usable system essentially includes the following components: high user

satisfaction and high efficiency and effectiveness (Jokela et al., 2003). However,
the system’s usability would depend on the context in which it is used, the goal of
the user, the task at hand and the user’s environment of use (the hardware, software
and materials that the user disposes with) (Jokela et al., 2003).

According to Johansson et al. (2015, p.1), website design patterns help websites to
become accessible to all computer users and please them all. However, Montero et
al. (2002, p.1) asserts that design patterns in websites originate from intuitions and
not from research. Should this be the case today, the usability boost of the website
design patterns may be ambiguous. This lack of research can be confirmed by
looking at the history of the hamburger icon. Its earliest use can be traced to the
interface design for the Xerox Star personal workstation in 1981 by Norm Cox and
research was not undertaken on its usability qualities (Alday, 2014) (Quora.com,
2014) (Vimeo.com, 2013) - “the hamburger, which looks like a list, seemed like a
good way to remind users of a menu list” (Campbell-Dollaghan, 2014).

Most people carry out computerized tasks with ease, relying solely on their
intuition but there is still a lot of people who experience trouble using computers
(McKay, 2008). Using computers is actually complicated, it often requires all
fingers of both of our hands and using them properly depends on several of our
senses (McKay, 2008). There are people who think with the help of visual images
while others think through speech or words (McKay, 2008). This basically
pinpoints that some users will remember better if they are shown visual material
while other will remember better if they are shown textual material (McKay,
2008). In terms of user interface patterns in websites, this would mean that the
usability of the patterns would somewhat depend on the cognitive preference of the
user. Not only does the term “good website” differs between user groups but an
efficient and effective website may not be a “good website” if it does not please the
aesthetic preferences of the given user (Sørum, Andersen and Vatrapu, 2012,
p.698). The visual appearance has an important role in usability as websites may
have around 50 milliseconds to impress the users and make them stay (Lindgaard
et al., 2006). Therefore, the satisfaction of the users’ from the examined design
patterns has to take into account their opinion about the design pattern’s current
visual appearance. Human-computer interaction principles require software to be
“functional, direct and easy to use” (Bian, Jin and Zhang, 2010, p. 718). The
system itself should bring the user emotional happiness upon interaction and it
should be “reasonable, efficient and consistent” (Bian, Jin and Zhang, 2010, p.
718). For example, a consistent website does not change its visual appearance
sporadically across webpages (Bian, Jin and Zhang, 2010). Finally, the given
system should be safe and stable (Bian, Jin and Zhang, 2010). A safe and stable
system would allow the user to reverse his/her action and attempt to reduce the
costs of an error (Bian, Jin and Zhang, 2010). For example, the WordPress
platform for website creation allows users to bring back deleted pages and posts. In
our context, when a user clicks on the hamburger icon on his/her smartphone and a
lengthy navigation pops on the screen - it is a good idea to be able to hide the
navigation again, possibly by clicking on the same icon again. Those are factors
that can be taken advantage of when evaluating the usability of the chosen design
patterns

CONCLUSION

Common trends in user interfaces enhance our understanding of human computer

interface as a field in computing and help improve the general usability, efficiency,
reliability, flexibility, and maintainability of products.

REFERENCES

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- Chen, X., Zou, Q., Fan, B., Zheng, Z. and Luo, X., 2019. Recommending
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