User evaluation of OIDE

Abstract

The Open Interface Development Environment (OIDE) was developed as part of the OpenInterface (OI) platform, an open source framework for the rapid development of multimodal interactive systems. It allows the graphical manipulation of components stored in a structured and rich repository of modalities and interaction techniques. The platform is expected to act as a central tool for an iterative user centred design process for multimodal interactive system design. This paper presents a user study (N=16) designed to explore how the platform was used in practice by multimodal interaction designers and developers.Participants were introduced to the features and functionality of the tool via tutorials and then engaged in an open multimodal design exercise. Participants were expected to explore various multimodal solutions to the design scenario using both traditional prototyping tools and the features available to them via the OIDE prototyping tool.The workshops were recorded and the interaction and dialogue examined to gather feedback on how the OI tool was used or could be used to support or enhance the design stages of prototyping a multimodal application or interface. The results indicate that the OI platform could be a useful tool to support the early design stages during multimodal interaction design. The tool appeared to promote thinking about and using different modalities. The teams varied in size and composition and this appears to have an effect on how the teams approached the task and exploited the OI prototyping tool. We will offer some guidelines as to how open, rapid prototyping tools such as OIDE can be improved to better support multimodal interaction design.