Understanding and Designing for Exploratory Interaction with Devices

Abstract

It is well known that users tend to use devices in an exploratory manner without referring to manuals even when the targeted tasks are not familiar. As devices are converging and growing multi-functional, the exploratory use and learning of interaction become more challenging as well as more important to users. This paper presents a framework to understand the problem solving in the exploratory interaction. The process of learning or performing interaction by exploration is structured as a search problem along the abstraction hierarchy of user-device interaction. This framework enables systematic analysis of the search problem and user strategies to solve it. The framework explains that the exploration can proceed in both top-down and bottom-up manner aiming to match the task knowledge and the evidences on the interface. The exploratory questions, utilized information, reasoning strategies, and the rules for hypotheses generation are also discussed. From an experimental observation of users’ guesswork based on a visual interface, a number of hypothesis-entertaining rules are identified and classified. The paper finally discusses a design process to systematically design the interaction and interfaces that facilitate exploratory use to maximize practical cognitive usability.