Multimodality from the User and System Perspectives
Joëlle Coutaz, Laurence Nigay, Daniel Salber · 1995
. This article is concerned with the usability and implementation of multimodal user interfaces. We show how the usability of such systems can be characterized in terms of the relations they are able to maintain between the modalities they support. Equivalence, assignment, redundancy, and complementarity of modalities form an interesting set of relations relevant to usability assessment and software design. We use the notion of compatibility between user preferences and system properties to show how the CARE properties interact with user modelling to predict usability during the design of a system. In addition we demonstrate how experimental evaluations can be based on the CARE properties. We then depart from the HCI perspective to consider the implications of such properties on software design and techniques: we present PAC-Amodeus, a software architecture model, in conjunction with a generic fusion mechanism. Keywords: Multimodal user interfaces, properties, usability, software arch...