Abordagem híbrida para a avaliação de interfaces multimodais.

Abstract

Several authors state that the methods applied to usability evaluation originally conceived for interfaces with the user of unimodals desktop applications (e.g., voice) might be inadequate for the evaluation of desktop interfaces that encompass more than one interaction modality (e.g, voice and gestures). Additionally, it is argued that the methods applied to a given desktop context (unimodal or multimodal) may be inadequate to a similar mobile context. Inserted in this context, the present research was ground edon the study of a hybrid approach designed for usability evaluation of interfaces for users of unimodal desktop applications, aiming to propose an evaluation methodology that might be adequate to the singularities concerning the multimodal user interfaces (MUTI). This way, the present work consisted of the extension of the referred hybrid approach for the multimodal context, focusing on the need of a joint or separate evaluation of the differed modalities. Similarly to the original approach, such an extension was founded into three evaluation perspectives, which are: (i) User performance measurement; (ii) Enquiry into the subjective user Satisfaction; and (iii) Conformity to standards inspection. The validation of the proposed approach consisted on choosing two case studies, one with a desktop and the other with a mobile device, and on the comparative result analysis of both laboratory and field tests.