HCI Seminar Series — Pointing Preconceptions Out • Recognition or Recall? The Case of Expert Features in GUIs

Please note: This seminar series has two speakers.

Mathieu Nancel
Loki Research Group
Inria Lille, France

Pointing Preconceptions Out 
The design of interactive systems today builds a lot upon previous system architectures and interaction paradigms, and upon general knowledge about the user’s needs and skills. However, classical system architectures hide technical constraints in their midst that we may not even acknowledge, and “what everybody knows” about user capabilities can turn out to be false.

In this talk I will present some of my recent and ongoing work on the design, tuning, and engineering of cursor control mechanisms, under the scope of common blind spots and misconceptions in interaction design. I will in particular discuss the consequences of system and human delays, why we consider them inevitable, and what interactive systems would need to address them.

Bio: Mathieu Nancel is a permanent researcher in the Loki research group at Inria Lille since 2016. After defending his Ph.D. in Saclay with Michel Beaudouin-Lafon in 2012, he worked as a postdoctoral fellow with Andy Cockburn in University of Canterbury (Christchurch, NZ), with Dan Vogel and Ed Lank in University of Waterloo (ON), and with Antti Oulasvirta in Aalto University (Helsinki, Finland).

His research interests span interaction technique design, understanding psychomotor phenomena, and the engineering of interactive systems. He works in particular on the ubiquitous task of cursor control, with a focus on fine-grained timing phenomena on both the user and the system sides.

Sylvain Malacria
Loki Research Group
Inria Lille, France

Recognition or Recall? The Case of Expert Features in GUIs 
Users have many options to enhance their productivity with applications, for instance by learning new interaction techniques to get their work done faster. One example of such interaction techniques are hotkeys, which enable rapid execution of frequently used commands. However, “expert” features like hotkeys are often ignored and users stick to “novice” interaction mechanisms, limited by a relatively low cap of performance. 

In this talk, I will describe some of my previous work that attempted to foster and facilitate the adoption of these features. I will also present more recent work discussing why we may be expecting too much from the user and how “expert” features could be re-designed to provide similar performance with less effort.

Bio: Sylvain Malacria is a permanent researcher in the Loki research group at Inria Lille. His research in Human-Computer Interaction investigates the design of novel interaction techniques and user interface refinements, with a focus on fostering the transition from novice to expert mode when interacting with systems. 

Before joining Inria, Sylvain has worked with Eric Lecolinet at Télécom Paristech on identifying which type of resources (software and hardware) can be used to enrich the input bandwidth, spent two years at the University of Canterburry (New Zealand) working with Andy Cockburn, and one year in the UCL/BBC Lab London.