2009-12-01
Brain measurement for usability testing and adaptive interfaces: An example of uncovering syntactic workload with functional near infrared spectroscopy
Publication
Publication
A well designed user interface (UI) should be transparent, allowing users to focus their mental workload on the task at hand. We hypothesize that the overall mental workload required to perform a task using a computer system is composed of a portion attributable to the difficulty of the underlying task plus a portion attributable to the complexity of operating the user interface. In this regard, we follow Shneiderman's theory of syntactic and semantic components of a UI. We present an experiment protocol that can be used to measure the workload experienced by users in their various cognitive resources while working with a computer. We then describe an experiment where we used the protocol to quantify the syntactic workload of two User interfaces. We use functional near infrared spectroscopy, a new brain imaging technology that is beginning to be used in HCI. We also discuss extensions of our techniques to adaptive interfaces. Copyright 2009 ACM.
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| Keywords | Brain, Evaluation, Syntactic, Workload |
| Persistent URL | dx.doi.org/10.1145/1518701.1519035 |
| Conference | 27th International Conference Extended Abstracts on Human Factors in Computing Systems, CHI 2009 |
| Citation |
Hirshfield, L.M. (Leanne M.), Solovey, E.T. (Erin Treacy), Girouard, A, Kebinger, J. (James), Jacob, R.J.K. (Robert J. K.), Sassaroli, A. (Angelo), & Fantini, S. (Sergio). (2009). Brain measurement for usability testing and adaptive interfaces: An example of uncovering syntactic workload with functional near infrared spectroscopy. In Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems - Proceedings (pp. 2185–2194). doi:10.1145/1518701.1519035
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