On 17 November 2016 I presented a seminar @i3 on feedforward, affordances and feedback, in the context of multimodal interaction with mid-air hand gestures and speech commands (for the ECOMODE project).
The motivation of the seminar was the need for a review of the latest works on feedforward for mid-air gestural interfaces. Designers of complex systems such as gestural interfaces have indeed few ready-to-use resources or guidelines to address basic interaction design challenges.
A domain where feedforward can be applied to solve interaction problems is that of gestural interfaces, because they have the problem of the “lack of visibility”:
- users do not know the available gestures (recognized by the system),
- nor what gestures to do (how to perform them).
Feedforward can help by telling the users:
- what available actions are
- what gestures to perform for that actions
- how to perform the gestures
So, feedforward is particularly important for interacting with gestural interfaces because it tells the user what the result of an action will be.
There are multiple definitions of feedforward, but no existing library of examples for designers to use to apply it in UIs.
In this seminar, I covered the basic definitions of feedforward, affordances and feedback, and presented the latest works and tools for providing feedforward in mid-air gestural interfaces.
Here’s my presentation:
Michela Ferron 