Help Me Help You. Designing Support for Person-Product Collaboration
Elyon A. M. DeKoven · Research Repository (Delft University of Technology) · 2004
This thesis explores how to make appliances, such as thermostats, televisions and microwave ovens, easier to program. It does so by looking at person-product interaction as a type of collaborative planning dialogues. The user and product must âtalkâ to each other, engaging in a collaborative dialogue that can lead to a shared plan concerning their mutually held beliefs and goals. The design challenge discussed in this thesis centers on the creation of product interfaces that facilitate collaborative person-product planning. In particular, a product interface should capitalize on the complementary strengths of the person and product: the product's ability to interpret user actions and goals and make efficient plans to achieve them, and the person's knowledge of what he or she wants to do. This goal is captured in the Help Me Help You (HMHY) principle, namely that a programmable product interface needs to be designed to help the user to better help the product know what the user wants to do, and thus better able to help the user. In other words, programmable appliance interfaces need to be designed to support person-product collaboration. The research question addressed in this thesis is how to develop a practical design method for supporting person-product collaboration from existing models of collaboration discourse. The design research in this thesis focused on the 'Some Things To Say (SenSay)' a modular adaptive menu derived from task models using collaborative discourse theory. The questions of how to design the SenSay from the theory and how people actually use it to get things done, as well as new methods for exploring and evaluating SenSay design, are all addressed across the different chapters of this thesis.