Integrating Support for Usability Evaluation into High Level Interaction Descriptions with NiMMiT

Abstract

Nowadays, the claim that a human-computer interface is user friendly, must be supported by a formal usability experiment. Due to its inherent complexity, this is particularly true when developing a multimodal interface. For such a rich user interface, there is a lack of support for automated testing and observing, so in preparation of its formal evaluation a lot of time is spent to adapt the programming code itself. Based on NiMMiT, which is a high-level notation to describe and automatically execute multimodal interaction techniques, we propose in this paper an easy way for the interaction designer to collect and log data related to the user experiment. Inserting 'probes' and 'filters' in NiMMiT interaction diagrams is indeed more efficient than editing the code of the interaction technique itself. We will clarify our approach as applied during a concrete user experiment.