Section: Research Program

Macro-Dynamics

Macro-dynamics concern longer-term phenomena such as skills acquisition, learning of functionalities of the system, reflexive analysis of its own use (e. g., when the user has to face novel or unexpected situations which require high-level of knowledge of the system and its functioning). From the system perspective, it implies to better support cross-application and cross-platform mechanisms so as to favor skill transfer. It also requires to improve the instrumentation and high-level logging capabilities to favor reflexive use, as well as flexibility and adaptability for users to be able to finely tune and shape their tools.

We want to move away from the usual binary distinction between “novices” and “experts” [3] and explore means to promote and assist digital skill acquisition in a more progressive fashion. Indeed, users have a permanent need to adapt their skills to the constant and rapid evolution of the tasks and activities they carry on a computer system, but also the changes in the software tools they use  [47]. And software strikingly lacks powerful means of acquiring and developing these skills [3], forcing users to mostly rely on outside support (e. g., being guided by a knowledgeable person, following online tutorials of varying quality). As a result, users tend to rely on a surprisingly limited interaction vocabulary or make-do with sub-optimal routines and tools  [48]. Ultimately, the user should be able to master the interactive system to form durable and stabilized practices that would eventually become automatic and reduce the mental and physical efforts, making their interaction transparent.

In our previous work, we identified the fundamental factors influencing expertise development in graphical user interfaces and created a conceptual framework that characterize users' performance improvement with UIs [7], [3]. We designed and evaluated new command selection and learning methods to leverages user's digital skill development with user interfaces, on both desktop [6] and touch-based computers.

We are now interested in broader means to support the analytic use of computing tools:

• to foster understanding of interactive systems. As the digital world makes the shift to more and more complex systems driven by machine learning algorithms, we increasingly loose our comprehension of what processes yielded the system to respond in one way rather than another. We will study how novel interactive visualizations can help reveal and expose the “intelligence” behind, in ways that people better master their complexity.

• to foster reflexion on interaction. We will study how we can foster users' reflexion on their own interaction in order to encourage them to acquire novel digital skills. We will build real-time and off-line software for monitoring how user's ongoing activity is conducted at an application and system level. We will develop augmented feedbacks and interactive history visualization tools that will offer contextual visualizations to help users to better understand their activity, compare their actions to that of others, and discover possible improvement.

• to optimize skill-transfer and tool re-appropriation. The rapid evolution of new technologies has drastically increased the frequency at which systems are updated, often requiring to relearn everything from scratch. We will explore how we can minimize the cost of having to appropriate an interactive tool by helping users to capitalize on their existing skills when appropriating a new interactive system.

We plan to explore these questions as well as the use of such aids in several contexts such as web-based, mobile or BCI-based applications. Although, a core aspect of this work will be to design systems and interaction techniques that will be as little platform-specific as possible, in order to better support skill-transfer. Following our Interaction Machine vision, this will lead us to rethink how interactive systems have to be engineered so that they can offer better instrumentation, higher adaptability, and fewer separation between applications and tasks in order to support reuse and skills transfer.