This interaction design thesis aimed to explore how users could be introduced to the different functionalities of a gesture-based touch screen interface. This was done through a user-centred design research process where the designer was taught different artefacts by experienced users. Insights from this process lay the foundation for an interactive, digital gesture-introduction prototype.Testing said prototype with users yielded this study's results. While containing several areas for improvement regarding implementation and behaviour, the prototype's base methods and qualities were well received. Further development would be needed to fully assess its viability. The user-centred research methods used in this project proved valuable for later ideation and prototyping stages. Activities and results from this project indicate a potential for designers to further explore the possibilities for ensuring the discoverability of touch-gesture interactions. For future projects the author suggests more extensive research and testing using a greater sample size and wider demographic.

Desktops, laptops, smartphones, tablets, and the Kinect, oh my! With so many devices available to the average consumer, the limitations and pitfalls of each interface are becoming more apparent. Swimming in devices, users often have to stop and think about how to interact with each device to accomplish the current tasks at hand. The goal of this thesis is to minimize user cognitive effort in handling multiple devices by creating a context aware hybrid interface. The context aware system will be explored through the hybridization of gesture and touch interfaces using a multi-touch coffee table and the next-generation Microsoft Kinect. Coupling gesture and touch interfaces creates a novel multimodal interface that can leverage the benefits of both gestures and touch. The hybrid interface is able to utilize the more intuitive and dynamic use of gestures, while maintaining the precision of a tactile touch interface. Joining these two interfaces in an intuitive and context aware way will open up a new avenue for design and innovation.

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Year after year, technologies are evolving in an incredible rapid pace, becoming faster, more complex, more accurate and more immersive. Looking back just a decade, especially interaction technologies have made a major leap. Just two years ago in 2013, after being researched for quite some time, the hype around virtual reality (VR) arouse renewed enthusiasm, finally reaching mainstream attention as the so called head-mounted displays (HMD), devices worn on the head  to grant a visual peek into the virtual world, gain more and more acceptance with the end-user. Currently, humans interact with computers in a very counter-intuitive two dimensional way. The ability to experience digital content in the humans most natural manner, by simply looking around and perceiving information from their surroundings, has the potential to be a major game changer in how we perceive and eventually interact with digital information. However, this confronts designers and developers with new challenges of how to apply these exciting technologies, supporting interaction mechanisms to naturally explore digital information in the virtual world, ultimately overcoming real world boundaries. Within the virtual world, the only limit is our imagination. This thesis investigates an approach of how to naturally interact and explore information based on open data within an immersive virtual reality environment using a head-mounted display and vision-based motion controls. For this purpose, an immersive VR application visualizing information as a network of European capital cities has been implemented, offering interaction through gesture input. The application lays a major focus on the exploration of the generated network and the consumption of the displayed information. While the conducted user interaction study with eleven participants investigated their acceptance of the developed prototype, estimating their workload and examining their explorative behaviour, the additional dialog with five experts in the form of explorative discussions provided further feedback towards the prototype’s design and concept. The results indicate the participants’ enthusiasm and excitement towards the novelty and intuitiveness of exploring information in a less traditional way than before, while challenging them with the applied interface and interaction design in a positive manner. The design and concept were also accepted through the experts, valuing the idea and implementation. They provided constructive feedback towards the visualization of the information as well as emphasising and encouraging to be even bolder, making more usage of the available 3D environment. Finally, the thesis discusses these findings and proposes recommendations for future work.

Multitouch technology allows the users to use both their hands and multiple fingers to manipulate digital content directly on the screen. This paper attempts to analyze the actual convenience of bimanual and multifinger manipulation on a multitouch display by conducting three observational experiments and studying how a group of volunteers use their hands and fingers when interacting with digital content on a touchscreen surface. In addition, the participants had to fill in a questionnaire where they give some additional insights on how they experienced the use of multitouch-based interface during the experiments. The results suggest that when participants were performing tasks in which they were instructed to manipulate the digital content as fast as they could, a high percentage of them resorted to the use of at least some level of bimanual manipulation of the digital content. However, when participants were told to perform the tasks calmly the big majority of participants decided to move the objects by using only one hand (unimanual). Same-hand multifinger manipulation was also used by a high percentage of participants when moving several objects simultaneously. Nevertheless, in all three experiments the most common way of moving objects across the screen was by dragging them one at a time (sequential move). Finally, in relation to the personal assessment made by the participants, a total of 70% feel that the possibility for engaging in bimanual interaction, that multitouch interface offers, is a clear benefit and advantage over traditional keyboard and mouse. However, 40% of the respondents feel that the use of mouse still is a more effective and natural form of interaction than multitouch technology.

Fundação de Amparo a Pesquisa do Estado de Minas Gerais / The researches about gestural interfaces have been grown significantly. In particular, after the development of sensors that can accurately capture bodily movements. Consequently, several fields arise for the application of these technologies. Among them stands the 3D modeling industry, which is characterized by having robust software. However, these software often lack a facilitator human-computer interface. This happens since the interaction is usually enabled by 2 degrees of freedom mouse. Due to these limitations, common tasks such as rotate the scene viewpoint or move an object are hardly assimilated by users. This discomfort with the usual and complex 3D modeling software interface is one of the reasons that lead to quit its use. In this context, Natural User Interfaces stand out by exploring the natural human gestures in a better way, in order to promote a more intuitive interface. This work presents a system that allows the user to perform 3D modeling using poses and hand gestures, providing an interface with 3 degrees of freedom. An evaluation was conducted with 10 people, to validate the strategy and application proposed. In this evaluation the participants reported that the system has potential to become an innovative interface, despite its limitations. Overall, the hand tracking approach to 3D modeling seems to be promising and deserves further investigation. / As pesquisas na área de interfaces gestuais vêm crescendo significativamente. Em especial, após o desenvolvimento de sensores que podem capturar movimentos corporais com precisão. Como consequência, surgem diversos campos para a aplicação destas tecnologias. Dentre eles, destaca-se o setor de modelagem 3D, o qual é marcado por possuir programas robustos. Entretanto, estes são muitas vezes ausentes de uma interface homem-computador facilitadora. Isto porque a interação, normalmente, é viabilizada pelo mouse com 2 graus de liberdade. Devido a estas limitações, tarefas frequentes como rotacionar o ponto de vista da cena e transladar um objeto são assimiladas pelo usuário com dificuldade. Este desconforto perante a usual e complexa interface dos programas para modelagem 3D é um dos fatores que culminam na desistência de seu uso. Neste contexto, Natural User Interfaces se destacam, por melhor explorar os gestos naturais humanos, a fim de promover uma interface mais intuitiva. Neste trabalho é apresentado um sistema que permite ao usuário realizar a modelagem 3D por meio de poses e gestos com as mãos provendo uma interface com 3 graus de liberdade. Uma avaliação foi conduzida com 10 pessoas, a fim de validar a estratégia e a aplicação proposta. Nesta avaliação os participantes reportaram que o sistema tem potencial para se tornar uma interface inovadora, a despeito de suas limitações. Em geral, a abordagem de rastreamento das mãos para modelagem 3D parece ser promissora e merece uma investigação mais aprofundada. / Mestre em Ciências

L’affinage technique et l’adoption récente des technologies tactiles multi-points par les industriels et les utilisateurs ont fixé l’attention des designers d’interaction sur ces technologies. Tandis que de nombreuses études en interaction homme-machine se sont intéressées à comparer la performance de ces interfaces à celle des interfaces WIMP traditionnelles, peu se sont attachées à intégrer dans leur approche les spécificités du canal gestuel et les modalités d’interactions multi-tactiles. Dans cette étude, je défends l’idée que le design de telles interactions ne peut être approché qu’en suivant un modèle d’interaction spécifique intégrant l’ensemble des composantes physiques, cognitives, sensorielles et motrices du geste dans le couplage homme-machine. J’articule ma recherche autour d’un espace de conception, courte analyse sociotechnique de mon objet d’étude, dans lequel je définis un modèle d’interaction descriptif et génératif. Je détermine un ensemble de principes conceptuels et techniques permettant l’évaluation et la conception du design d’interfaces multi-tactiles de manière systémique et extensible. Au cours de cette étude, je précise les limites du paradigme d’ « interface naturelle » en nuançant les effets du réalisme des interactions dans l’efficacité de tels systèmes. Enfin, je présente les travaux de conception et de développement d’un environnement de développement réalisé dans le cadre d’un dispositif CIFRE qui a accompagné cette étude et permis d’enrichir le modèle théorique. / The technical refinement and the recent adoption of multi-touch technologies by both the industry and users made these technologies a major concern for interaction designers. While many studies on human-computer interaction have started to compare this type of interface with traditional WIMP interfaces performance-wise, few have included in their approach the gestural and system mapping specificities of multi-touch interactions. In this study, I defend the idea that such interaction design should follow a specific interaction model taking into account physical, cognitive, sensitive and motor aspects of gestures in the human-computer relation. I define a design space, sort of socio-technical approach, which participates in the definition of a descriptive and generative interaction model. I establish a set of conceptual and technical principles that allow the evaluation and conception of multi-touch interfaces, in a systemic and extensible way. Throughout this study, I emphasize the limits of the « natural user interface » paradigm by having a better understanding of how interaction realism affects system efficiency. Finally, I present a multi-touch framework developed as part of a CIFRE collaboration, which helped this study in the design and the extension of the conceptual model.

This work is an interdisciplinary study involving mainly the fields of information visualisation and human-computer interaction. The advancement of technology has expanded the ways in which humans interact with machines, which has benefited both the industry as well as several fields within science. However, scientists and practitioners in the information visualisation domain remain working, mostly, with classical setups constituted of keyboard and standard computer mouse devices. This project investigates how a shift in the human-computer interaction aspect of visualisation software systems can affect the accomplishment of tasks and the overall user experience when analysing two-dimensionally displayed multivariate networks. Such investigation is relevant as complex network structures have seen an increase in use as essential tools to solve challenges that directly affect individuals and societies, such as in medicine or social sciences. The improvement of visualisation software’s usability can result in more of such challenges answered in a shorter time or with more precision. To answer this question, a web application that enables users to analyse multivariate networks through interfaces based both on hand gesture recognition and mouse device was developed. Also, a number of gesture designs were developed for several tasks to be performed when visually analysing networks. Then, an expert in the field of human-computer interaction was invited to review the proposed hand gestures and report his overall user experience of using them. The results show that the expert had, overall, similar user experience for both hand gestures and mouse device. Moreover, the interpretation of the results indicates that the accuracy offered by gestures has to be carefully taken into account when designing gestures for selection tasks, particularly when the selection targets are small objects. Finally, our analysis points out that the manner in which the software’s graphical user interface is presented also affects the usability of gestures, and that both factors have to be designed accordingly.

Šio magistro darbo užduotis – apžvelgti šiuo metu labiausiai naudojamas vartotojo sąsajas, kurios padeda žmogui sąveikauti su kompiuteriais ir kitais įrenginiais bei sąsajų architektūros būdus, kurie palengvina programų kūrimą. Taip pat išanalizuoti šiuo metu plačiausiai naudojamus metodus interneto paslaugoms įgyvendinti, kad būtų rastas sprendimas, kaip interaktyvios informacinės sistemos galėtų bendrauti tarpusavyje be apribojimų reikiamam funkcionalumui gauti pasirenkant geriausią būdą saugoti ir atvaizduoti reikiamus programos duomenis kuo paprastesniu ir lankstesniu būdu. Sukurti lygiagrečių tekstynų prototipą, kuris leistų matyti gautą rezultatą su galimybe kuo lengviau ir greičiau rasti bei koreguoti automatiškai sugeneruotus netikslumus, jei tokie yra, pritaikant sąsają, kuri būtų patogesnė ir reikalautų kuo mažiau darbo pastangų. Pasinaudojant prototipu atlikti tyrimą, kuris parodytų įvesties įrenginių naudojimo tendencijas. Darbą sudaro 8 dalys: įvadas, vartotojo sąsajų apžvalga, vartotojo sąsajos atskyrimas, interneto paslaugų analizė, XML duomenų bazės, vartotojo sąsajos kūrimas, išvados ir literatūros sąrašas. Darbo apimtis – 48 p. teksto be priedų, 25 paveikslai ir 2 lentelės. Atskirai pridedami 2 darbo priedai. / The purpose of this thesis is to review most currently used user interfaces that help people interact with computers and other equipment, and begin exploring new user interface paradigm, which allows humans to interact naturally with the computer. Furthermore, analyze the most widely used methods today for implementing web services, to find a solution how interactive information systems could communicate with each other without any restrictions to gain an overall result choosing the best way to store and display relevant data to the program simpler and more flexible way. Create an interactive parallel corpus development environment prototype for minimizing available errors, if they occur, from the generated parallel translation as easy as possible using as less human labor as possible. Using the prototype, perform a study that will show trends in the use of different interface input devices. The work consists of 8 parts: introduction, overview of user interfaces, user interface separation, web services analysis, XML databases, user interface development, conclusions and references. Thesis consists of: 48 pages of text without appendixes, 25 pictures and 2 tables. Two enclosures of the work are enclosed separately.

Många företag har idag intranät som misslyckas med att möta användarnas behov och det mest förekommande klagomålet är att användarna inte hittar vad de letar efter. Detta leder till att företagen tappar både tid och pengar på att ha personal som inte kan nyttja systemet på ett effektivt sätt, vilket ofta leder till dyra utbildningskostnader och produktivitetsförluster. Den främsta anledningen till att information inte hittas är att det saknas en konsekvent navigation som ger tydliga indikationer på vart användaren ska ta sig för att finna det den letar efter. Design och struktur i gränssnitt spelar även en stor roll för hur användarna förstår och tolkar gränssnitt och ett klassiskt tillvägagångsätt för designers är att utveckla utifrån datorparadigmets grafiska gränssnitt, vars bekymmer oftast är att de tenderar att bli visuellt giriga och minneskrävande. Idag sker även en stark utveckling av mobila enheter och hur dess gränssnitt kan optimeras för att underlätta för användaren till den mobila kontexten och de begränsningar det medför. För att göra detta bör designers utveckla naturliga interaktioner vilket ska främja den kognitiva belastningen. I denna studie undersöks därför hur designriktlinjer för naturliga interaktioner och mobilitet påverkar användbarheten och användarvänligheten för arbete i en stationär datormiljö. Studien har genomförts på uppdrag av CLX Networks som skapar lösningar för bland annat sms, röst och data. Uppdraget har inneburit att förbättra företagets intranäts meny som ansetts bristfällig av CLX. I denna studie genomfördes först ett användartest på CLXs befintliga intranäts meny samt fem stycken intervjuer med de som arbetar med support som använder systemet, inom huvudområdena hittbarhet, handlingsbarhet, användbarhet och mobil användarvänlighet. Vidare gjordes en struktureringsmetod för att låta informanterna själva visualisera en tänkt meny. Resultaten från den empiriska studien användes för att skapa en interaktiv prototyp. Designprinciper för hittbarhet, handlingsbarhet, användbarhet och naturliga interaktioner har nyttjats i skapandet av den nya menyn. Utifrån de undersökningar som har genomförts i denna studie har det framkommit att designprinciper för naturlig interaktion och mobilitet har en positiv inverkan på användarvänligheten gällande menyn i grafiska gränssnitt i en stationär datormiljö. Studien visar även att en kombination av de två synsätten, naturliga interaktioner och datorparadigmet underlättar användandet och den kognitiva belastning som tidigare var ett bekymmer för de anställda. / Today many companies have intranet failing to meet the users need and the most frequent complaint is that users do not find what they are looking for. This leads companies to lose both time and money on having employees that are unable to utilize the system in a sufficient manner, which often leads to expensive educational costs and loss of productivity. The primary reason that information is not found is that there is a lack of a consistent navigation tool that clearly indicates where the user should go to find what he/she is looking for. Design and structure in an interface plays a large role when it comes to how users understand and interpret an interface. However, the difficulty is that it tends to be visually disruptive and provide a cognitive load. Currently are a strong development of mobile devices taking place and questions are raised regarding how these interfaces can be optimized to make it easier for the user. Especially, when it comes to the mobile context and the limitations it causes. To make it easier are designers advised to develop natural interactions which are supposed to ease the cognitive load. This study therefore explores how design principles stemming from natural interactions, together with the mobility, affect the usability and ease of use for work in a desktop environment. The study has been conducted upon request of CLX Networks, a company that provide solutions for, among others, sms, voice and data. The assignment has entailed suggestions of improvements of the company’s intranet menu, which has been considered as inadequate by CLX. In this study, a user test of CLX’s current intranet menu was performed as well as five interviews with employees that work and use the system. The interviews concerned the topics of findability, actability, usability and mobile usability. Continuously was a card sorting performed to let the informants themselves visualize a proposed menu. The results from the empirical investigation were used to create an interactive prototype. Design principles from findability, actability, usability and natural interactions have been utilized in the creation of the new menu. Based on the investigations performed in this study is it possible to conclude that design principles from natural interactions and the mobility have a positive influence on ease of use concerning the menu in the graphical interface in a desktop environment. The study also confirms that a combination of the two viewpoints, natural interactions and desktop paradigm that facilitate the usage and cognitive load, which previously was troublesome for the employees.