Gesture and voice prototyping for early evaluations of social acceptability in multimodal interfaces

Abstract

Interaction techniques that require users to adopt new behaviors mean that designers must take into account social acceptability and user experience otherwise the techniques may be rejected by users as they are too embarrassing to do in public. This research uses a set of low cost prototypes to study social acceptability and user perceptions of multimodal mobile interaction techniques early on in the design process. We describe 4 prototypes that were used with 8 focus groups to evaluate user perceptions of novel multimodal interactions using gesture, speech and nonspeech sounds, and gain feedback about the usefulness of the prototypes for studying social acceptability. The results of this research describe user perceptions of social acceptability and the realities of using multimodal interaction techniques in daily life. The results also describe key differences between young users (18-29) and older users (70-95) with respect to evaluation and approach to understanding these interaction techniques.