An Optimized GUI Based On Users' Abilities

Ostracus writes "Researchers at the University of Washington have recently developed a system, which, for the first time, offers an instantly customizable approach to user interfaces. Each participant in the program is placed through a brief skills test, and then a mathematically-based version of the user interface optimized for his or her vision and motor abilities is generated. The current off-the-shelf designs are especially discouraging for the disabled, the elderly and others who have trouble controlling a mouse, because most computer programs have standardized button sizes, fonts, and layouts, which are designed for typical users."

Comments

The real killer app...

[Anonymous Coward]

would be a system that automatically and continuously monitors mouse movements and typing and continuously adjusts the user interface for the user's current skill level.

That way as you drink more beer the fonts get bigger and the mouse remains useable. Bonus points if eyeball movement can be detected and the screen be moved in time with the wobble.

Re:Tech support

[impaledsunset]

I'm not sure that the idea will work at all. You spent half an hour for the program to learn about your abilities. During this time, it might have correctly guessed some of the settings which will be correct for you, but still it will be far from perfect and you might need to tweak it anyway. And I'm talking about the case when you have serious disabilities, if you don't, the task of this program will be hard.

Tweaking the settings on your own will take you less time, and even if they are not perfect, your false impression that you're fine with the GUI this way will actually improve your productivity. Not so if you spent twenty minutes doing bullshit and end up with a GUI settings that you find horrible at first.

The system might be useful if it does learn while you work, and it tries to guess what improvements to the interface would be necessary. One problem that in both cases this will be very hard to get right. I don't say it's impossible, it's good that someone is trying to do it, but unless they do take this very seriously and spend enourmous amount of time and money on research, this won't work.

And I'm sure that this time could be spent on researching what problems users actually have with the GUIs and in creating a suitable way for them to tweak them. Which means spending the time in actually improving the GUI itself.

Now, if tech support has troubles because of the changes, I think it will be the least of the problems. If the UI changed that much, the nightmares for the user will be guaranteed. Unless the user has serious disabilities, in which case the changes will actually help, even with tech support issues.

Existing support for scaling the UI

[dleigh]

I have athralgia which prevents me from using a mouse. I rely heavily on keyboard shortcuts but use a trackball as a pointing device. I often find GUI buttons are too small and easily overshot - and the worst offenders often have dialogs without any support for keyboard shortcuts. InfraActive comes to mind - they even removed keyboard shortcuts between versions 7 and 8. Button scaling in many apps breaks the layout, or doesn't even work. While this is a interesting and useful development, I don't see anything changing soon on the disability usability front. There is existing support in common OSs for making global UI changes, but most apps ignore/override these settings or just break horribly because the UI developer didn't design the interface to adapt to these sort of changes.

Already been done... well, mostly...

[bhtooefr]

GEOS actually had a user skill level function. Not sure how aggressive it was in the later versions, but the earlier versions were quite aggressive.

The beginner mode had no file management - it just gave you an application, with a drastically simplified interface (no drop down menus,) and the program could only open one document, and I believe multitasking just didn't happen. There were giant EXIT and HELP buttons.

Intermediate mode had applications with a full user interface (but always maximized,) and you could manage a restricted subset of files.

Advanced let you do whatever you wanted, gave you full functionality, and actually had windowing, not maximized windows for everything.

I am color blind

[Extremus]

I am color blind. And I can tell you that I HATE web designer! Why do they need to use, for example, light green for the links on white background?!

Ok Ok. Some designer think of it. But only in major websites...

Re:Worse design hurts typical users, too

[b4dc0d3r]

I wonder, on a daily basis, how someone less abled than I could use some of these interfaces. Not to pick on these apps but they are on my mind.

• VLC, when it stops playing, resizes back to 1 inch by 2 inches or so. If it's maximized, and you click the exit button on the top right, there's a chance it will go away and you will click the exit button of whatever app was behind it, maximized. I trained myself to use "ALT-F-X" to quit, then they removed the "File" menu, and added a shortcut ALT-Q, so now it makes no sense among other windows apps.
• Firefox tell you when it's time to update. It has "update" on the left side, and "skip" on the bottom right, where I am used to seeing "next" or "continue" type buttons. Then when the update is finished, the "finished" button is on the bottom right, the opposite side of the dialog from the "update" button you just clicked. So I usually hit "skip" because it's in the wrong place, then when I do hit the "update" button I'm pissed off because now the next button I have to click is right where I wanted to click in the first place.
• Typing any sentence that includes a space in it can have any random effect on your computer. While you're typing, a modal dialog pops up and asks you something, with the default key set to "yes". Just typing the space key clicks the button. If you are a touch typist you might catch the dialog, but hunt-and-peck typists or anyone struggling to use a keyboard will have no idea that they just clicked something. So the alternate interface (keyboard) in this case interferes with the intended interface (mouse).
• Application Minimize/Maximize buttons are RIGHT NEXT to the "close this application immediately" button. How in the holy crap is a disabled user supposed to deal with that?
• Internet explorer especially, trying to navigate through forms, you get a "tab stop" on every link, form field, or any random collection of things ever. So on a site with extensive top navigation, sub navigation (left side) and hyperlinked help text, it can be hundreds of links you have to tab through to get to the form field. Of course there's the old "onLoad=javascript:document.formname.fieldname.focus()" but if I'm already typing because the site loads slowly, that function is going to make me overwrite something. In some cases, I have typed in a username, hit tab, then the page finishes loading and focuses back on the username while I type in the password in clear text. Opera used to use TAB for forms, and "a" key for links. Firefox lets you choose a mutually exclusive way of doing things, so as far as I can see there is no "links only" and "fields only" command available at the same time (accessibility.tabfocus). If I were disabled and trying to navigate a web page, I would probably go back to lynx, or quit using the intartubes completely.
• Especially in Windows NT-based lines, hard disk I/O is prioritized. I can't tell you how many times I switch between applications, or even just try to accomplish something in Windows while I/O is going on, and I can't even figure out what's going on. CTRL-ALT-DEL does not bring up the task manager for 30 seconds to a minute. ALT-TAB doesn't switch, or the application seems hung. Can't click on any explorer windows (and explorer is almost the entire graphical interface). But when it comes up, Task Manager reports 20% or lower CPU usage, often 95% plus is going to the system idle process. I can't cancel anything when that happens, just have to wait for your computer to do what it wants before it does what I want. This isn't particularly a user's abilities complaint, but the interface should actually interface - not be a one way read only "I'm busy doing something, come back laterface". Especially with multithreading and multiple cores!

Re:Reason not to buy chain saw at discount store

[jc42]

As to blaming customers for being stupid about user interfaces on everything from chain saws to computers, there is something to be said about proper training and for purchasing from sales outlets that provide that training.

Of course, with computers, a big part of the problem is that most of the settings, options, whatever, aren't documented anywhere that the user is likely to discover. And when something is documented, it's usually in the developers' obscure jargon that doesn't share any keywords with the description a typical user would give.

I recently stumbled across a useful example: I'd been frustrated for years that, good as firefox is, it didn't seem to have a way to do something obvious that was in all the other browsers (of the 12 on my Mac, for example) had right there in the obvious menu: I couldn't get it to open a group of bookmarks in tabs in a new window. I made all sorts of guesses, googled for it, and asked on various forums. A few people said that it was possible, but gave no clues as to how. Then suddenly, a few months ago, I mentioned it in a comment here in /., and someone answered with the key combo. It's shift-click on the menu item, in the OSX edition. Now, I used shift-click in a number of other situations, but I guess I hadn't accidentally tried it on a bookmarks group-level item. Of all the zillions of possible multi-key possibilities in the zillions of widgets I see on the screen, there was no particular reason to guess that it would do that in this widget. There's no metaphorical interpretation of the various shift-clicks that I know; they all seem to do something totally idiosyncratic when they do anything at all.

I just repeated a search through FF's Preferences stuff, and I can definitely say there's no clue there. Or if there is, it's couched it terms that make no sense to me. The "Tabs" window has only six items, and clearly none of them applies to this task. If it's hidden somewhere else, I can't spot it.

This isn't particularly a criticism of FF, of course. It's just a single recent instance of a universal problem with computer UIs: The user usually has no way of discovering most of the capabilities, other than in discussions like this, on line or via email or in person or however. Or by randomly hitting keys and trying to make sense of the responses.

This is especially frustrating, because you know that most apps have one or a small number of tables that handle the mapping of input to functions. It should be easy to present this table to the user, and let them edit it. I've seen this done in a few apps. I've written such config windows myself for several apps. But even in the few cases where this is done, it's usually nowhere near complete, so users remain ignorant of most of the hidden capabilities.

What's even more frustrating is that, as a developer, I've worked on several jobs where I was explicitly ordered not to write such an unneeded tool. "Customers aren't asking for it; don't waste your (billable) time on it." In other cases, it was written and widely used by developers during testing, but was removed as unneeded "debug" code in the deliverable.

So now, instead of such "unneeded" tools, we're reading about a much more complex config approach that doesn't educate the user, but instead enables a minimal subset that limits the user to what they understood during the initial installation. Somehow I'm not sure this is an improvement. I think I'd prefer something that tells me what is implemented, and maybe lets me configure it a bit to match any physical (or mental ;-) limitations I may have.