Raymond Walden Bennett

Interfaces for consumer products: “how to camouflage the computer?”

INTRODUCTION User interfaces for consumer products are notoriously bad. The increase of computing power in consumer products, from personal computers and diaries, televisions, video and audio products to kitchen machines provides increasingly more functionality that is theoretically available but not practically accessible to users. Most HCI research is devoted to applications for which the computing systems are clearly present and usable to the trained. In contrast, the users of consumer electronics products do not expect to need computer skills to interact with their TV sets or car stereo’s. In consumer products, the computing systems are embedded and hidden from the users by the user interface. Their user interfaces have at least a dual function: platform for the quality of the human-computer interaction and carrier of the system’s attractiveness and purchasing appeal.

An evaluation of the diagnostic rhyme test

The intelligibility of a speech output device is an important predictor of user acceptability. The Diagnostic Rhyme Test (DRT) is an ANSI standard for measuring speech intelligibility (ANSI S3.2-1989). In the DRT, respondents hear a word and choose its equivalent from two visually presented words. The two words differ only in their initial (e.g., veal-feel), and the two consonants differ only in a single distinctive acousticphonetic feature (e.g., voicing). To define “distinctive feature”, the DRT uses a minimal distinctive feature system, loosely based on the work of Jakobson et al. (1963) and Miller and Nicely (1955). These studies carefully analyzed natural speech errors in various noise environments. Whether or not these studies can be freely applied to alternative forced-choice tests of coded or synthesized speech is an empirical issue. In the present study, the results of a Consonant Identification (CI) task were compared to a previously conducted DRT using the same coding algorithms. The CI data indicated that the low-bit-rate coded speech yielded significantly more multifeature confusions then the uncoded speech. Moreover, the multifeature confusions could not be easily predicted from the single-feature confusions. A fundamental assumption of the DRT is that speech errors are adequately diagnosed by testing single-feature confusions. The results of the present study contradict that assumption. In conclusion, we argue that the application of the DRT (and more generally, any closed-response choice procedure) to coded or synthesized speech is questionable.

Interactive television: a new challenge for HCI

Interactive television (ITV) is a burgeoning new medium with exciting possibilities and challenges for the CHI community. This tutorial provided a basic introduction to the field by delving into three different aspeets: the market and scope of ITV, the types of and platforms for ITV, and how HCI relates to designing applications for ITV. While most material was presented in lecture format, the participants also worked on a small design problem which was reviewed by others in the class.