Paper Reading 18: Evaluating the design of inclusive interfaces by simulation

Reference Information:

Title: Evaluating the Design of Inclusive Interfaces by Simulation.
Authors: Pradipta Biswas, Peter Robinson.
Conference: IUI '10 Proceedings of the 15th international conference on Intelligent user interfaces.

Summary:

The authors have developed a simulator to help with the design and evaluation of assistive interfaces. The simulator can predict possible interaction patterns when undertaking a task using a variety of input devices, and estimate the time to complete the task in the presence of different disabilities.

They have evaluated the simulator by considering a representative application being used by ablebodied, visually impaired and mobility impaired people. In the study that they conducted, they compared the simulator's predictions of the time it would take for people with impairment for performing various tasks vs. the time it would take for accomplishing these tasks for other users.

The simulator predicted task completion times for all three groups with statistically significant accuracy. The simulator also predicted the effects of different interface designs on task completion time accurately.

(Fig 1.0 Use of the simulator)

Discussion:

After reading this paper, I have an opinion that this is not a paper that presents a research idea or something that's new in the field. Instead, it presents results of the user study that the researchers conducted. They present their findings and this valuable piece of data can be used by other researchers to develop new applications and systems.