Promoting and improving discoverability in interactive systems – Discovery

This 4-years project in Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) consists of establishing a new fundamental understanding of how to design and implement discoverable interactive systems. This project addresses a fundamental limitation in the way interactive systems are usually designed, as in practice they do not tend to foster the discovery of their input methods (operations that can be used to communicate with the system) and corresponding features (commands and functionalities that the system supports). This project is timely, since advances in academic and industrial HCI research have led to the recent release of novel commercial interactive systems (e.g. smartphones, smartwatches, VR) relying on various input methods, and we argue that a poor discoverability of these input methods can significantly impact the adoption of these interactive systems. Most of the literature on discoverability has been conducted on public display and tabletop interaction, or in a sporadic way proposing isolated ad-hoc solutions to alleviate the limitation of a novelly proposed system, rather than as a generic reflection and study of the overall problem of discoverability. Therefore, to this date, a more generic and holistic comprehension of the problem is still required. Our objective is to provide these generic methods and tools to help the design of discoverable interactive systems: we will define validation procedures that can be used to evaluate the discoverability of user interfaces, design and implement novel UIs that foster input method and feature discovery, and create a design framework of discoverable user interfaces. While this project will investigate the context of touch-based interaction, it will also focus on two timings when the user might trigger a reflective practice on the available inputs and features: while the user is carrying her task (discovery in-action); and after having carried her task by having informed reflection on her past actions (discovery on-action). This dual investigation will reveal more generic and context-independent properties that will be summarized in a comprehensive framework of discoverable interfaces. Our ambition is to trigger a significant change in the way all interactive systems and interaction techniques, existing and new, are thought, designed, and implemented with both performance and discoverability in mind.