Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!mcvax!ukc!warwick!rlvd!mdw
From: mdw@inf.rl.ac.uk (Mike Wilson)
Newsgroups: comp.cog-eng
Subject: Re: Technological overcomplexity in 1523
Message-ID: <3506@rlvd.UUCP>
Date: 16 Aug 88 13:31:46 GMT
Reply-To: mdw@inf.rl.ac.uk ()
Organization: Rutherford Appleton Laboratory, Didcot. UK.
Lines: 50

In article <1664@grian.UUCP> liz@grian.UUCP (Liz Allen-Mitchell) says:


>Re Edward M. Embick's proposal about adjusting an interface to adjust
>to the user's skills:

>It occurs to me that people do this all the time.  It is particularly
>striking when it doesn't work right
... [example about computer store salespersons incorrectly judging the
knowledge of potential purchasers]
>Maybe a more direct approach would work
>better?  That is, ask the user something to try to judge his level?

Without stating all the arguments for and against auto-adaptive
interfaces, there are several people working on this whose work
may be of interest here. Computer store salespersons appear to
have a very small set (usually 1) of dialogue styles/scripts they
follow with potential customers, probably because they are inexperienced
both in the social skills required to generate new styles and in
confronting a range of customer types. 

Pierre Falzon at INRIA in Paris has done a series of studies looking
at the different dialogue styles/scripts in a variety of situations
of human-human communication. One example is that of medical 
receptionists answering the phone to people wishing to make appointments
with doctors. He clearly demonstrates several different scripts being
used and how the variety used by a receptionist is dependent on her/his
experience. He is using these studies as the basis for interactive
interfaces which can offer different dialogue styles/scripts for 
users with different levels of expertise in either computers or
the domain of application. Both the humans and the system interfaces
should select the appropriate dialogue styles/scripts on the basis of
the information imparted in the first few conversation turns.

Ref:

Falzon, P., Amalberti, R. and Carbonell, N. (1986) Dialogue control 
strategies in oral communication. In Foundations for Human-Computer
Communication, K. Hopper adn L.A. Newman (eds.). Elsevier Science
Publishers B.V. (North-Holland), IFIP: Netherlands.

A second line of research has been into more psychological measures
of cognitive style (e.g. extravertion/introversion, visualiser/verbaliser,
field-dependent/independent) and how interfaces can be modified to 
optomise on these variables. Obviously, part of the problem here is 
selecting a suitable test to establish a categorisation of the user.

Ref: Fowler, C.J.H. and Murray, D.M. (1987) Gender and cognitive
style differences at the human-computer interface. In Proceedings
of INTERACT '87, Stuttgart, West Germany, September 1987.