Sylvie Athènes

Legible, are you sure?: an experimentation-based typographical design in safety-critical context

Designing Safety-critical interfaces entails proving the safety and operational usability of each component. Largely taken for granted in everyday interface design, the typographical component, through its legibility and aesthetics, weighs heavily on the ubiquitous reading task at the heart of most visualizations and interactions. In this paper, we present a research project whose goal is the creation of a new typeface to display textual information on future aircraft interfaces. After an initial task analysis leading to the definition of specific needs, requirements and design principles, the design constantly evolves from an iterative cycle of design and experimentation. We present three experiments (laboratory and cockpit) used mainly to validate initial choices and fine-tune font properties. Results confirm the importance of rigorously testing the typographical component as a part of text output evaluation in interactive systems.

Rhythmic menus: toward interaction based on rhythm

In this paper, we evaluate an interaction style based on visual and auditory rhythms. We describe this rhythmic interactor and experimentally compare it to the pull-down menus found in current graphical user interfaces. The main result is that, for short and medium length menus, sound-enhanced rhythmic menus are faster than pull-down menus.

Motor coordination dynamics underlying graphic motion in 7- to 11-year-old children

Using concepts and tools of a dynamical system approach in order to understand motor coordination underlying graphomotor skills, the aim of the current study was to establish whether the basic coordination dynamics found in adults is already established in children at elementary school, when handwriting is trained and eventually acquired. In the study, 45 children and 9 adults volunteered to copy two series of 13 ellipsoid shapes. These shapes were generated by manipulating the relative phase between 0° and 180° of two orthogonal oscillators in two orientations. Findings showed that although children from an early age onward and adults reproduced straight lines precisely (i.e., 0° and 180°), the former drew ellipsoid shapes in a less eccentric fashion than the latter (i.e., ∼90° in all children rather than ∼60° and 120° in adults). This tendency to write in a rounder fashion persists until 11 years of age, suggesting that the coordination dynamics underlying graphomotor skills and tentatively shaping the coordinated activity involved in adult handwriting appears only later, probably due to increasing constraints on speed.

Effets des paramètres graphiques sur la perception visuelle: expérimentations sur la forme, la surface, l'orientation des objets et la définition des ecrans

User interfaces of critical systems, such as air traffic control displays, use graphical objects to code for an ever increasing amount of information. This evolution brings forth concerns about the detection and identification of the displayed objects, in particular for small size objects. First, graphic properties of the interface should include some knowledge about the interplay between colour, shape and size interactions, and the visual perception. Second, the redesign of any interactive system should take into account the particularities of the evolving software and hardware display technology (pixel size and structure, for example) in order to preserve crucial aspects of the initial visual display. The two experiments described in this paper are aiming towards building a more systematic knowledge of graphic properties interactions per se, and their changes as a function of display technologies. More precisely, we examined the effect of the object size, shape and luminosity, as well as its contrast with the background. Results show that object perception is dependent upon its size, its contrast with the background and the overall luminosity of the background. Furthermore, for small size objects, interactions between pixel luminosities and pixel arrangement greatly influence their perception by the human eye.

Switching among graphic patterns is governed by oscillatory coordination dynamics: implications for understanding handwriting

Revisiting an original idea by Hollerbach (1981), previous work has established that the production of graphic shapes, assumed to be the blueprint for handwriting, is governed by the dynamics of orthogonal non-linear coupled oscillators. Such dynamics determines few stable coordination patterns, giving rise to a limited set of preferred graphic shapes, namely, four lines and four ellipsoids independent of orientation. The present study investigates the rules of switching among such graphic coordination patterns. Seven participants were required to voluntarily switch within twelve pairs of shapes presented on a graphic tablet. In line with previous theoretical and experimental work on bimanual coordination, results corroborated our hypothesis that the relative stability of the produced coordination patterns determines the time needed for switching: the transition to a more stable pattern was shorter, and inversely. Moreover, switching between patterns with the same orientation but different eccentricities was faster than with a change in orientation. Nonetheless, the switching time covaried strictly with the change in relative phase effected by the transition between two shapes, whether this implied a change in eccentricity or in orientation. These findings suggest a new operational definition of what the (motor) units or strokes of handwriting are and shed a novel light on how coarticulation and recruitment of degrees of freedom may occur in graphic skills. They also yield some leads for understanding the acquisition and the neural underpinnings of handwriting.

Outils d'aide à la conception de rendus graphiques

This paper describes tools for the design and assessment of graphical rendering of complex interactive systems interfaces. More precisely, the tools help controlling graphical properties of actual sample scenes. The graphical properties pertain to the three dimensions of color: luminosity, chroma and hue. Our tools enable designers to set and check the graphical rendering properties in a more accurate and efficient way. We illustrate the benefits of our tools by giving actual scenarios of graphical rendering parameterization.

Designing Graphical Elements for Cognitively Demanding Activities: An Account on Fine-Tuning for Colors

Interactive systems evolve: during their lifetime, new functions are added, and hardware or software parts are changed, which can impact graphical rendering. Tools and methods to design, justify, and validate user interfaces at the level of graphical rendering are still lacking. This not only hinders the design process, but can also lead to misinterpretation from users. This article is an account of our work as designers of colors for graphical elements. Though a number of tools support such design activities, we found that they were not suited for designing the subtle but important details of an interface used in cognitively demanding activities. We report the problems we encountered and solved during three design tasks. We then infer implications for designing tools and methods suitable to such graphical design activities.