Human Interaction with Advanced Mobile Services and Intelligent Environments (INTERACT)

Professor Kari Kuutti, Department of Information Processing Science, University of Oulu
Research Professor Heikki Ailisto, VTT Electronics
kari.kuuttioulu.fi, heikki.ailistovtt.fi
http://www.infotech.oulu.fi/interact

Background and Mission

The research group consists of researchers from the Department of Information Processing Science and VTT Electronics, Advanced Interactive Systems Research Field.

Currently, the HCI research is facing larger and larger challenges, with advanced mobile services and intelligent environments moving from research laboratories towards everyday use. The problems with WAP acceptance are a good example of the dangers of designing without a user-centered approach: despite the success in realising the technology, the commercial success remains elusive because, for the majority of potential users, “the pain is greater than the gain”. While making telephone calls and sending text messages poses only moderate requirements on the device user interfaces, the more advanced services envisioned and even partly realised today are significantly more demanding. A smoothly operating and intuitive user interface will be a fundamental element of all successful applications and an important element of competition. Mobile services may still bear some resemblance to traditional applications, but new, intelligent, adaptive environments differ considerably more with respect to user interfaces, and the usefulness of old design knowledge will indeed be limited.

There are therefore a number of difficult but interesting research problems on different levels:

• The emergence use of non-traditional interaction modalities, such as voice, gestures and gaze, sets new requirements on HCI design, and opens up totally new, unexplored possibilities.
• There is a need for advanced technological architectures that can provide the necessary HCI services to the user and adapt to situations.
• We do not know how to efficiently utilize small, differently sized interfaces in the realisation of advanced mobile services
• We lack efficient design methods for combinations of mobile devices and traditional services, not to mention methods to design interfaces for intelligent environments.
• Although there is a body of knowledge for user-centered HCI design, we do not know which parts of that knowledge are directly applicable and what else might be needed.

The user experience in mobile networks and intelligent environments will be less controlled than with traditional applications. This is due to the fragmentation of service provision, which will be composed from parts offered by different providers. Ensuring that this collection will not have a detrimental effect on the user experience is a totally novel design challenge. Moreover, the increase in the number of stakeholders in service provision will make the organising of HCI design even more complex.

Human interfaces and experience with advanced mobile services and intelligent environments will be one of the major design challenges when the systems are moved from research laboratories towards everyday use. The INTERACT research group is addressing this problem area on a number of levels which support each other. At the level of basic research, the group is modelling the use situation of advanced services and intelligent environments, and correspondingly envisioning and constructing novel technology architectures needed to provide the optimal user experience in those environments in a controlled way. The group is also developing and experimenting with novel forms of enhanced multimodal interaction for devices and environments. Moreover, the group is developing new methods and techniques for design interaction in intelligent environments, and constructing test environments where both the interaction techniques and design methods can be tested and validated. Finally, the group is developing methods for evaluation and improvement of HCI design processes in product development organisations.

Scientific Progress

During 2004 the main scientific results were

• A new method for "live" data collection for both testing and requirements capture purposes of mobile applications. The "Experience clip" method was presented at the Participatory Design conference in Toronto. (ADAMOS/Rotuaari projects, Isomursu et al.)
• Final results of the ATELIER project. The EU Disappearing Computer project, Atelier, ended with excellent results - it was considered by the commission to be one of the three EU projects to be presented and demonstrated to the new EU parliament as examples of the quality of EU-funded research, but unfortunately it was ultimately not used. The contribution of INTERACT to the project was strong both in mixed reality interface development (eDiary application) and platform software development. (The infrastructure developed by INTERACT for Atelier was immediately taken to serve as a basis for further development in another EU project application, PANDORA.) (Atelier/EU-project)
• Development of techniques for visualising scenarios. (An EU ITEA project, Nomadic Media, T. Jokela)
• The development of a model to analyse the usability of consumer products. (T. Jokela)
• A rich interaction model for game and virtual interaction design. (Doctoral dissertation by T. Manninen)
• A new, "performance" oriented model to analyse and design mixed media interfaces. (Doctoral dissertation by G. Jacucci)
• A method palette to test user acceptance and attitudes towards mobile technology. (ADAMOS/Academy-project, L. Arhippainen in cooperation with a French research group from Grenoble)
• The development of a flexible system to implement adaptive menus in mobile devices, and field tests using the adaptive menus. (ADAMOS/Academy-project, T. Rantakokko)

Exploitation of Results

Dissemination of results - The group has been publishing very actively, and additionally the members of the group have been giving talks, presentations and demonstrations on a number of occasions both in Finland and abroad, in both academic and industry-led events. Several short visits from other groups have also been hosted, including visits from Japanese and French delegations.

Industry cooperation - The cooperation with the EU ITEA project, Nomadic Media, and the TEKES/FENIX project, Rotuaari, has continued. In addition, a new TEKES project, ÄES, with extensive industrial participation has been started. A number of Master's theses have been supervised in cooperation with industry.

Personnel

External Funding

Doctoral Theses

Manninen T (2004) Rich interaction model for game and virtual environment design. Acta Universitas Ouluensis A 410.

Jacucci G (2004) Interaction as performance. Cases of configuring physical interfaces in mixed media. Acta Universitas Ouluensis A 427.

Also Volkmar Pipek's doctoral thesis "From tailoring to appropriation support: Negotiating groupware usage" printing permission granted in 2004, but the defence was delayed until 2005.

Additionally to doctoral theses, two licentiate theses were finished in 2004: Netta Iivari's Cultural aspects in the facilitation of user involvement in the software development and Anna-Liisa Syrjänen's Knowledge in the making: a practitioner-intensive systems development.

Selected Publications

Iacucci G, Kela J, Pehkonen P (2004) Computational support to record and re-experience vision. Personal and Ubiquitous Computing 8(2):100-109.

Jokela T (2004) Evaluating the user-centredness of development organisations: conclusions and implications from empirical usability capability maturity assessments. Interacting with Computers (16):1095-1132.

Jokela T (2004) When good things happen to bad products: where are the benefits of usability in the consumer appliance market. Interactions - New Visions of Human-Computer Interaction XI(6):29-35.

Ailisto H, Lindholm M, Mäkelä S-M, Vildjiounaite E (2004) Unobtrusive user identification with light biometrics, Proceedings of the Third Nordic Conference on Human-Computer Interaction, NordiCHI 2004, October 23-27, Tampere, Finland, 327-330.

Iivari N (2004) Enculturation of user involvement in software development organizations - an interpretive case study in the product development context. Proceedings of the Third Nordic Conference on Human-Computer Interaction, NordiCHI2004, October 23-27, Tampere, Finland, 287-296.

Iivari N (2004) Exploring the rhetoric on representing the user: discourses on user involvement in software development. Proceedings of the Twenty-fifth International Conference on Information Systems, December 12-15, Washington, DC, USA, 631-643.

Isomursu M, Kuutti K & Väinämö S (2004) Experience clip: method for user participation and evaluation of mobile concepts. Participatory Design Conference (PDC’04), July 27-31, Toronto, Canada.

Isomursu P, Perälä M, Tasajärvi L & Isomursu M (2004) Platform requirements for internet-based amateur video delivery. Proceedings of the Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences (HICSS), January 5-8, Hawaii, USA.

Syrjänen A-L & Kuutti K (2004) Trust, acceptance, and alignment: the role of IT in redirecting a community. Social Capital and Information Technology. Eds. Huysman M & Wulf V, MIT, 21-51.

Pulli P & Antoniac P (2004) User interface. Application no. 09/473,709, patent no. US 6771294, accepted August 3, 2004, United States.