Usability Analysis in Locomotion Interface for Human Computer Interaction System Design

Abstract

In the past decade and more than any time before, new technologies have been broadly applied in various fields of interaction between human and machine. Despite many functionality studies, yet, how such technologies should be evaluated within the context of human computer interaction research remains unclear. This research aims at proposing a mechanism to evaluate/predict the design of user interfaces with their interacting components. At the first level of analysis, an original concept extracts the usability results of components, such as effectiveness, efficiency, adjusted satisfaction, and overall acceptability, for comparison in the fields of interest. At the second level of analysis, another original concept defines new metrics based on the level of complexity in interactions between input modality and feedback of performing a task, in the field of classical solid mechanics. Having these results, a set of hypotheses is provided to test if some common satisfaction criteria can be predicted from their correlations with the components of performance, complexity, and overall acceptability. In the context of this research, three multimodal applications are implemented and experimentally tested to study the quality of interactions through the proposed hypotheses: a) full-body gestures vs. mouse/keyboard, in a Box game; b) arm/hand gestures vs. three-dimensional haptic controller, in a Slingshot game; and c) hand/finger gestures vs. mouse/keyboard, in a Race game. Their graphical user interfaces are designed to cover some extents of static/dynamic gestures, pulse/continuous touch-based controls, and discrete/analog tasks measured. They are quantified based on a new definition termed index of complexity which represents a concept of effort in the domain of locomotion interaction. Single/compound devices are also defined and studied to evaluate the effect of user’s attention in multi-tasking interactions. The proposed method of investigation for usability is meant to assist human-computer interface developers to reach a proper overall acceptability, performance, and effort-based analyses prior to their final user interface design.