Department of Information and Computer Sciences
University of Hawaii
1680 East West Center Road, POST 305D
Honolulu, HI 96822
E-mail:
crosby@uhics.ics.hawaii.edu
phone (808) 956 3493
FAX 808) 956 3548
http://www.ics.hawaii.edu/~mcrosby/
Usability and User-Centered Design.
Adaptive Human Interfaces.
eye-movements, visual search, viewing strategies, user modeling,. user differences, interface complexity
Computers are capable of instantly providing large amounts of information to information seekers. If too much information is presented at once, however, human efficiency in processing this information can drop dramatically. The purpose of this project is to investigate strategies that people use to extract information from computer screens. A goal of this research is to search for relationships between users' individual differences and their performance as they search documents of several levels of complexity. This objective is being addressed by a series of experiments that examine the relationships between psychological variables and computer interfaces along a continuum of tasks. In particular, eye-movement monitoring has been used to gather detailed information on viewing patterns and strategies for a range of typical computer screen types during the performance of different types of tasks.
In order to compare performance of subjects for different formats for different tasks, a range of computer screen types are employed. Tasks include enumeration, locating known and unknown targets, browsing, reading and performing tasks on multi-user interfaces. Screen complexity ranges from simple to very complex, depending on the type of experiment. Tasks designed to investigate how people perceive numbers and how they extract information from lists use very simple screens while tasks which investigate how people view bibliographic citations, how they extract information from complex data models, and how they perceive multi-user interfaces are increasingly complex.
Two basic types of experiments are performed. The first type is to ask the subject to do a task in order to discover a pattern or strategy evident in eye movements that characterize doing that task. The second experiment consists of asking the subject to answer a question about a particular screen in order to classify the type of task that the subject was doing by looking at the resulting eye movement pattern. The two experiments are complementary in that the first experiment type specifies the task and gives rise to patterns that have been classified in advance, and the second experiment type specifies a screen type and gives rise to patterns that reflect the type of task the subject performed. A number of psychological tests are administered to each subject in order to relate individual differences to task performance.
Crosby, M. and Chin, D., Evaluating Multi-user Interfaces (EMI). Proceedings of the 7th Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) International Ô97.
Nordbotten, J. and Crosby, M., Individual user Differences in the Evaluation of Data Model Comprehension Proceedings of the 7th Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) International Ô97.
Nordbotten, J. and Crosby, M. Data Model Comprehension: An experiment with 3 graphic styles Proceedings of the 8th Annual Workshop of the Psychology of Programming Interest Group, Ghent, Belgium, 1996.
Nordbotten, J. and Crosby, M. Reading Strategies for Graphic Models from an Experiment in Data Model Perception Proceedings of the Fifth International Conference on User Modeling, 1996.
Crosby, M., Nordbotten, J. Graphic Data Model Perception. Proceedings of the 39th Annual Human Factors and Ergonomics Society, San Diego, CA., 238 - 242, 1995.
Nordbotten, J., Crosby, M. Recognizing graphic detail: An experiment in user interpretation of data models. Proceedings of BNCOD13, Manchester, England, 64-78. Springer, 1995.
Nordbotten, J., Crosby, M. Data Model Legibility - A comparison of 3 graphic styles. Proc. NIK'95, Gran, Norway. Tapir, 1995.
Crosby, M., Stelovsky, J. Towards Computer -Supported Testing: A Multimedia Environment for Evaluation of Distributed Multimedia User Interfaces, Proceedings of the IASTED/ ISMM International Conference, Palo Alto, CA, pp. 173 - 175, 1995.
Howard, D., Crosby, M., Snapshots from the Eye: Towards Strategies for Viewing Bibliographic Citations, In Advances in Human Factors/Ergonomics: Human-Computer Interaction: Software and Hardware Interfaces, Elsevier Science, Amsterdam, (eds. G. Salvendy G and M. Smith) Vol. 19B, 488 - 493, 1993.
Crosby, M. and Peterson, W., Using eye movements to classify search strategies, Proceedings of the Human Factors Society, 1991, V 2, 1476 - 1480.
This research builds on results found in the areas of visual search, task complexity and individual differences. Relevant literature is found in the fields of Educational Psychology, Cognitive Science, and Human Factors. In addition to the users' individual differences, we need to consider what is known about how users comprehend screen-displayed text and graphics. We need to know how to determine task complexity. Eye-movement equipment can be used to determine whether the user is searching, browsing or reading.
Egan, D. Individual differences in human-computer interaction. Handbook of Human-Computer Interaction, M. Helandar, Ed. Elsevier, 1988.
Kosslyn, S. Understanding charts and graphs. Applied Cognitive Psychology, 3, 185-226, 1989.
Hegarty, M., Just, M. A. & Morrison, I. R. Mental models of mechanical systems: Individual differences in qualitative and quantitative reasoning. Cognitive Psychology, 20, 191-236, 1988.
Jacobs, A. Toward a model of eye movement control in visual search. Eye Movements: From Psychology To Cognition , 1987.
Rich, E. A. Users are individuals: individualizing user models. IJMMS, 18, 199-214, 1983.
Usability and User Centered Design, Intelligent interactive systems for persons with disabilities, Virtual Environments, and Speech and Natural Language Understanding,.
Since knowledge about how people find information is fundamental to several of the ISP areas, there should be ample opportunities for collaboration. Potential project s could be to extend our research on the evaluation of tasks in multimedia environments to include persons with disabilities.