Abstract

Several industrial and academic research groups are working to simplify the control of appliances and services by creating a truly universal remote control. Unlike the preprogrammed remote controls available today, these new controllers download a specification from the appliance or service and use it to automatically generate a remote control interface. This promises to be a useful approach because the specification can be made detailed enough to generate both speech and graphical interfaces. Unfortunately, generating good user interfaces can be difficult. Based on user studies and prototype implementations, this paper presents a set of requirements that we have found are needed for automatic interface generation systems to create high-quality user interfaces.

Highlights

  • Home and office appliances are becoming more complex as embedded computers enable new kinds of functions

  • Each user would carry a personal universal controller (PUC), a device that allows the user to interact with all the appliances and services in her environment

  • A PUC could take many forms: an unimpaired user might have a handheld computer with a graphical user interface (GUI), whereas a blind user might have an interactive Braille surface or small headset that supports speech recognition and speech output

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Summary

Introduction

Home and office appliances are becoming more complex as embedded computers enable new kinds of functions. An unimpaired user could get a handheld controller with a color LCD touch-screen, or a special headset that made speech interfaces possible in noisy environments. Another benefit is that the user could always receive a consistent interface, even across appliances. For example, that disabling the components for functions that were not available helped users tremendously While this is consistent with user interface guidelines, it has never been followed for today’s remote controls. The most surprising discovery after developing our list of requirements is that no current specification system we are aware of fulfills each and every requirement Some requirements, such as grouping components in a tree, are found universally, while others are always missing.

Related Work
Graphical Designs
Speech Designs
Requirements
Two-Way Communication
Simultaneous Multiple Controllers
No Specific Layout Information
Hierarchical Grouping
Actions as State Variables and Commands
Dependency Information
Sufficient Labels
Shared High Level Semantic Knowledge
Requirements in the PUC System
Conclusion

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