John F. Meech

A framework for the development of information appliances

This paper provides a framework for the design and development of personal information appliances - interactive technologies which aim to assist users in managing personal information in organisational, group and environmental contexts. The emphasis is on integration, both in terms of the development of integrated families of appliances and in terms of way in which appliances provide an integration of the diverse media necessary to support the management of personal information.

Interface engineering in an office information appliance

This paper describes Wells, a prototype information appliance that supports communication, information exchange and information management between coworkers. The appliance is particularly targeted on the requirements of the relationship between managers and their assistants. Wells aims to integrate and coordinate a range of information devices such as phones, faxes, and email and incorporate it with diary-based information. In more general terms, Wells provides an opportunity to explore the issues of ‘personal information management’ and the design of interfaces to appliances to support these activities [1].

Diaries as family communication tools

The modem lifestyle is characterised by its complexity and speed. There is an extra layer of complexity for families where both parents are trying to balance conflicting demands of work and family. This paper describes one approach to address this problem a Personal Equilibrium Tool or PET, a tool to help coordinate activity and balance work and family schedules, that would be especially useful for dual-career families.

Getting a grasp on virtual reality

This paper describes the development and initial evaluation of a novel system for providing force-feedback to a user’ s’ hand in a virtual environment. The development addresses the problem of providing simple (robust and low cost) but effective sensory cues to assist a user in grasping virtual objects. The approach is to provide approximate but distinctive ‘solidity’ feedback, which together with visual cues creates the sensation of having grasped an object. The initial evaluations indicate that user response is very favorable.

Finding the cut of the wrong trousers: fast video search using automatic storyboard generation

The development of high capacity storage media and moving image file format standards (e.g. MPEG-2) have improved the quality of digital video and provided the possibility of enhanced digital video browsing techniques. This paper describes an approach to search and navigation in video databases which automatically identifies shots in a video sequence to present a single frame from each shot that best represents the shot as a whole. Using the approach a storyboard is generated which can be either visually scanned by the user, or searched using automatic techniques such as query-by-visual-example (QVE).

Issues in the Design of Personal Office Support Systems

The work undertaken by office-based professionals who work closely together on information management tasks has been the object of various studies which seek to categorise and provide guidelines for the smooth performance of those tasks. However, current technology support to be found in many offices provides little in the way of integration between different information media and processes, usually relying on the workers themselves to ‘adapt and survive’ both in terms of ‘personal work’ and ‘collaborative work’. This paper describes the complexities in the design of computer-based technologies to support through a detailed study of the design of a ‘personal office support system’ (POS) currently being undertaken.

Multimedia information using mobile computers: accessing the digital campus and the digital library

Abstract It is clear that the role of the information resource is changing. Major publishers have been slow to adapt to the emergence of a global digital medium, but there are now signs that a great deal of information will be delivered on-line, (although at present only about 25 databases account for 80% of usage in UK and optical publishing is still in its early stages). However, digital publishing on the Internet — with services for libraries such as just-in-time purchasing and delivery, for example — will be a driving force in creating the ‘global digital medium’. One issue that will become increasingly relevant is how the individual user accesses rich multimedia data in the most appropriate way. The ‘digital university campus’ and the ‘digital library’ are coming to be important concepts, with the aim that users of information services will receive information on-line supported by a ‘ubiquistructure’ of information technology. For the ‘digital campus’ this means that not only scholarly but also teach...

Information, artefacts and management strategies: the personal perspective

A study was undertaken to explore the artefacts and strategies used by mobile workers to manage their information. Using over 40 semi-structured interviews, a number of common features were found to hold across the sample group both in terms of the information that was maintained and the reasons why it was carried. These results suggest that there is a rich diversity of strategies for managing personal information, which may be embodied in common artefacts such as diaries and address books. Consequently, these results have a significant impact for the design of electronic devices for personal information management.

An Analysis of the Human-Computer Interfaces to High-Energy Physics Control Systems at CERN

Publisher Summary This chapter provides an overview of the challenges faced in the design of operator interfaces for high-energy physics experiments. While this domain of study has some similarities with industrial process control, the operator characteristics and complexity of the physical systems and environment provide a multitude of challenges for interface designers. The chapter describes the results of an initial survey of existing user-interfaces. This survey is based on user task analyses, process modeling and display audits. The results of this survey suggest that there are many possibilities for improving the design of operator user interfaces, with the penalty of an initial up-front investment of effort and time. The chapter describes that with the advent of an integrated control framework for the experiments, it will be possible to provide design guidelines and new implementations of user-interfaces that will be generic to a wide range of future high-energy physics experiments.

Interaction in context - context in interaction

Publisher Summary This chapter examines the combination of knowledge-based support coupled with a high bandwidth on the interface as solutions to operator problems. A variant of the Crossmans water bath experiment is used (also used heavily in process control) and a set of different media interfaces have been developed for the experiment by combining sound, speech, graphics, animation, color, text, and still video. Subjects carry out a large number of trials to achieve steady state conditions in the bath. In some conditions warnings were given (either audio or visually). It is concluded that the use of Multimedia interfaces, in specific situations, did improve performance, learning, or satisfaction, or sometimes all three aspects. However, the difficulty of the task, the knowledge of the operator, the sophistication of the surrounding software, and whether the experiments are laboratory-based or in a real plant, are all relevant issues and affect the interpretation of the results.