A control centred approach to designing interaction with novel devices.
Gavin J. Doherty, Tim Anderson, Michael Wilson, G. Faconti · International Conference on Human-Computer Interaction · 2001
Modern information technology is becoming both increasingly ubiquitous and increasingly varied in the possible ways the user can interact with it. Accompanying this, there is a trend towards interfaces where the user is in constant interaction with the computer system, communicating with it by many different means, such as gestures, speech and haptics as well as discrete communication. This development requires new interface design approaches that allow for the analysis of the continuous as well as the discrete aspects of the interface, and that support reasoning about real−time issues. In the area of manual control, theories have been developed for continuous control of systems by human operators. In this paper we examine how we can apply manual control concepts in a qualitative fashion to the design and analysis of interactive systems. This involves a focus on control and feedback signals, transformations of these, and control characteristics of user, device and controlled process. While we make reference to the particularly challenging application area of performance control systems for disabled musicians, we believe that control issues of this nature will become increasingly common in interface design.