I did my Master's thesis at i10 under the supervision of Oliver Nowak.
Thesis Publication
- Yeganeh Sadat Hajimiri. I can say “Navigate me there”: A Comparison of Different Interface Designs to Improve the Discoverability of Multimodal Interaction Techniques. Master's Thesis, RWTH Aachen University, Aachen, December 2021.
2021
Abstract
The research and technology in the field of multimodality are becoming mature enough to let us use multimodal interactions in daily applications and benefit from the advantages of a multimodal system, such as increasing efficiency, context flexibility, and improving user satisfaction. But the problem is that there exist design gaps, like discoverability of the new multimodal interactions on an interface, that are not comprehensively investigated in the literature. For example, in most studies, the users have been told about the possibility of multimodal interactions on an interface and how they can be performed. But the fact is that we are not with the users in a daily application when they start using this new class of interface. Therefore, in this thesis, we propose different interface designs to improve the discoverability of gaze-speech and touch-speech multimodal interactions on a map application to do location-related tasks. Experts helped us to find the two most promising interface designs (InteractionMap and Game). We evaluated these two interfaces based on the discoverability, awareness, and learnability of the two target multimodal interactions. In a between-subject user study with 36 users, a comparison of the two interfaces with a baseline, which introduces the new interactions using a video, shows that the two interfaces are not different from the baseline. In fact, Game was better than the other two in touch-speech awareness, and very similar to Baseline in gaze-speech awareness. The findings of this thesis can help future works to enrich the multimodal interactions in daily applications for novices.