I'm a Master student studying Software System Engineering. Currently I am working on my master thesis "a classification of interaction styles that span multiple systems", under the co-supervision of Prof. Jan Borchers, Jonathan Diehl and Chat Wacharamanotham in this group, and Prof. Irene Mittelberg, Sukeshini Grandhi by Human Technology department.
A Classification of Interaction Styles that Span Multiple Systems
With the development of techniques and the growing interest of user-centered design, more and more new ideas of advanced interaction technologies are proposed and implemented. And the use of Multiple Display Environment (MDE) makes collaborations and information exchange more efficient. However, when heterogeneous portable devices are involved, how to choose a suitable technique to meet users’ requirements becomes an issue. In fact, only few literatures present classifications about cross-device interaction techniques. The existing ones are not complete enough to describe the major properties of each technique, especially from the capability aspect. In this thesis work, we present a design space with 10 dimensions and the corresponding graphical representations, which are sufficient to depict the properties of the existing interaction techniques. In our design space, the properties of input methods, the level of utilizing spatial information of the involved devices, the control mechanism, and parallelism aspects are of most concern. Moreover, 13 major techniques supporting cross-device object relocation tasks are introduced, and each of them is fitted in the design space. The graphical representation visualizes the distinctions between techniques, and indicates a comprehensive and intelligent classification. The dimensions we identified reflect user preference of the selected techniques and have different influences on users’ performances. Among them, some dimensions are context dependent. These hypotheses have been proved by our evaluation.