Assuming that private industry will take the lead in mainstream
product development and short-term research, the steering committee
presents here recommendations for research that it believes federal
research agencies should encourage.1 Federal initiatives that emphasize
long-term goals beyond the horizon of most commercial efforts and that may
thus entail added risk have the potential to move the whole information
technology enterprise into new modes of thinking and to stimulate
discovery of new technologies for the coming century. Of course, work
should continue in current areas that have demonstrated promise, but the
emphasis here is on opening up new opportunities. Five of the areas
elaborated on under recommendations 2 and 3 in this chapter are
designated for highest-priority attention because of their potential for contributing
to the development of effective every-citizen interfaces.
Recommendation 1: Break away from 1960s technologies and
paradigms. Major attempts should be made to find new paradigms for
human-machine interaction that employ new modes and media for
input and output and that involve new conceptualizations of application
interfaces.
Needed in the technical community is a period analogous to the
1960s when a variety of paradigms were tried using emerging technologies
of that time. The view then was of a single user interacting with a
single terminal using a mouse, menus, and windows to open documents
within a local application. The new view should take into account the tasks
and technologies of the present and should enable a variety of
interactions between humans and machines for communication, information
retrieval, and performance of tasks in any of a variety of environments.
Moreover, new approaches should enable users to immerse themselves in
computer-mediated interactions and should include the option of involving
many humans and machines in collaborative activities. New paradigms
should emphasize the new role of information technology in society as a
mediator among individuals, groups of individuals, and networked machines.
The steering committee's first recommendation is a call not to
replace visual interfaces but rather to infuse them with new power and
capability through document-centric design, speech, gesture, agents,
position-aware and pressure-sensitive input devices, touch screens, and other
emerging technologies and techniques. It also emphasizes bringing to
fruition equally important new interface strategies, such as speech and voice
response, that will carry the power of computing to environments and
populations not served today. Today's interfaces often require too much of
a user's vision and motor control in situations, such as driving, that
present environmental distractions, or they assume physical or other abilities
that many potential users may lack.
Coordinated research across several disciplines is necessary to
develop new technologies and paradigms that address the
psychological, organizational, and societal characteristics of every citizen. This
interdisciplinary research should include the testing and evaluation of new
interface technologies and paradigms in laboratory or field experiments
or other empirical studies involving people who are representative of
the citizenry.
The research agenda should acknowledge that the
human-machine interface is more than screen deep and should consider every aspect of
a person's experience in using computing and communications.
People should be able to concentrate on the tasks or purposes for which they
are using applications and should experience the interface as an aid
rather than an obstacle to achieving success. People should experience a
human-problem domain interaction rather than a human-machine
interaction.
Several technological and design constraints should be considered
in developing a research agenda:
Architectures are needed for interfaces that have wide
spectrum and are easily learnable. Such systems should have simple and
semantically obvious commands so that novices can use them immediately.
They also should have many levels of increasingly sophisticated
capabilities that can be learned incrementally, so that people can move gracefully
into more advanced and efficient uses. Such systems could be used in
very sophisticated ways by experienced users.
Systems should support modality and medium independence.
Research should be fostered to enable anytime, anywhere, anyone
interfaces that enable people to interact with systems using whatever
modalities and media are available and convenient at a given time
(consistent with the functions being performed). Such interfaces would support
the goals of (1) ubiquitous and nomadic access so that a user can
communicate on the road, down the hall from the office, calling in via
telephone, and so forth; (2) equipment and communications system
independenceuse of low versus high bandwidth, one medium (e.g., audio, video,
text) versus another, and so on; and (3) user ability independence, with
special concern for people with disabilities and for the changes in abilities
that typically accompany aging.
Human-machine interfaces should support group
(multiperson and multimachine) activities that are work oriented, social, or
conducted for other purposes; the groups could be formal, established, or short
term and ad hoc. In particular, interfaces should support communities of
practice in which many individuals can participate, each contributing
incrementally. To build interfaces that provide such support requires
further development of theories of dialogue, theories of group behavior,
and theories of joint planning and problem solving.
Interfaces to the national information infrastructure should
treat the two directions of communicationsto and from individual
citizensmore evenhandedly. Historically, with respect to elements of the
NII such as broadcast television, citizens have been passive consumers
of information. The evolving NII opens prospects for systems and
interfaces that provide more flexibility in who can send and receive
information, from what locations, and in what manner, as well as more flexibility
and ease for people to move between communications- and
information-centric activities.
Information resources should have more attractive means of
entry than those available so far. Two possibilities that could merit
further research include (1) the concept of hyper-television that enables a
viewer to pursue a presented object or event into cyberspace or (2)
electronic encyclopedias with ubiquitous pointers into electronic libraries and
other sources.
Methods are needed that enable citizens to achieve the
security and privacy they desire. Security-related features can be inconvenient
to use; better interfaces could lower the barriers that have deterred their
use historically.
Recommendation 2: Invest in the research required to provide
the component subsystems needed for every-citizen interfaces.
Research is needed that is aimed at both making technological advances and
gaining understanding of the human and organizational capabilities these
advances would support.
Determine the needs of citizens: highest
priority. Apply available sociological, psychological, and human-computer interface
methodologies to try to understand the problems and the needs basic to
effective human-machine interaction. Undertake studies to find the kinds of
functionality and interfaces that will be most important. Such studies may
be empirical or historical to determine what was successful in the past.
For example, the usefulness and success of existing public information
access projects, such as the Library of Congress system, could be examined.
Proposed new technologies could be simulated and measurements
made of their levels of success in real-life situations. Information so
gathered should then guide decisions on what the most important technical
areas are for research emphasis.
Input technologiesExplore the promise of speech recognition and
associated natural language processing: highest
priority. Do the work necessary to open up speech as a viable input for as many new uses as possible.
The steering committee is impressed that the range of potential
applications for spoken input is tremendous, especially for hands-busy, eyes-busy
situations; telephone applications; and differently abled persons. This
need, coupled with the rate of progress in speech recognition, points to
the importance of continued emphasis on this line of research. An
important area that needs more attention is the construction of prototype
speech interactive systems and their measurement and refinement in actual use.
Improve understanding of computer vision, gesture sensing,
and multimodal languages for user input. Computer vision can be used to
gather data a user may wish to transfer to the network and to keep the
system updated regarding the user's presence and responsiveness. Gesture
recognition could involve the development of gesture languages and
gesture support of multimodal languages.
Measure the effectiveness of all of the above technologies
when used by humans in problem-solving situations.
Output technologies, including eyeglass displays; flexible,
portable, and compact displays; high-resolution displays; virtual reality;
haptic devices; mechanical actuators; voice and artificial sound; and
multimodal generation of output. Develop display technologies to match human
vision. Create audio output matched to the dynamic range of human
hearing. Measure the effectiveness of these technologies in a systematic
program to evaluate their relative strengths for human users.
Ensure modality and medium independence: highest
priority. Media independence and modality independence are goals that, to this
time, have not been extensively researched and, in the new context,
should befor nomadic systems, for low-cost systems, and for people with
disabilities. Develop mechanisms that enable translations between
internal machine representations of information and various human
representations (e.g., visual, audio, haptic). Research in this area will encourage
the use of a common machine representation that can be flexibly
translated into or from any available modes or media. Determine human
multimedia and multimodal communications capabilities. Enumerate and
prioritize human capabilities to modulate energy (as described in Chapter 3).
Agent technologies. An important option for delivering services
to users will involve agent technologies that interact with people to
help determine their needs and then select domain-appropriate mechanisms
to respond. The required technologies include traditional computer
science mechanisms (such as those needed for database retrieval) and
artificial intelligence capabilities (including representation of concepts and
reasoning). An array of research topics needs to be addressed, including
acquisition of user requests, user modeling, problem solving, and
methodologies for summarizing and presenting internally stored data.
Network access devices. A large variety of devices are needed,
including mobile terminals, inexpensive minimalist systems, and full
multimedia systems with virtual reality capabilities. The steering
committee expects that industry will perform most of this work.
Recommendation 3: Encourage research on systems-level design
and development of human-machine interfaces that support
multiperson, multimachine groups as well as individuals.
Develop theories and architectures for collaboration: highest
priority. Develop theories of collaboration and problem solving. Develop
architectures for networked people and machines that enable mutual
awareness, easy communication across space and time, and individual and joint
contributions to common goals. Provide ways to support community
building and other social aspects of communication. Theories of
collaboration have not been well developed historically, and the advent of
networking makes this an important new priority for research.
Human-centered design
methodologies. Continue the study of human behavior in the use of technology for problem solving and the
design of systems for improved productivity. Investigate the social effects
of different interface choices, particularly the ways in which different
presentation and communications choices affect people's interactions
with media. To obtain feedback and to facilitate efforts at improvement,
encourage social science research into how well the public is being
served by such technology.
Test proposed new designs: highest
priority. Build experimental human-machine systems, for individual users or groups, using
proposed technologies or simulations of them. Test, refine, and install them
in applications environments, and measure their effectiveness.
Industry, under the pressure of competition, has in recent years tended to
minimize user testing in favor of quickly getting products to customers.
Marketplace success has become the de facto test for usability by humans.
Unfortunately, this approach does not lead to the kind of understanding
that enables reasoned design of useful devices. Better understanding
gained from testing and evaluation is needed to achieve breakthroughs to
new paradigms, and to address the needs of differently abled
individuals whose market buying power may be inferior to that of majority groups.
NOTE
1. In addition to supporting research, the government can encourage
forward-looking approaches to accessibility for every citizen to the national information
infrastructure by requiring adequate development processes and evaluation in the procurement and
use of systems for public service facilities under government control.