| At the point of sale in retail businesses, employees are a problem. A problem comprised of high turnover, unmet consumer expectations and lost sales, among other things. One of the traditional strategies used by human resource departments to cope with employee behavior, or “misbehavior,” has been to strictly script employee/customer interactions. Another, more recent approach, has been the development of systems to replace the human worker; in other words, to effect transactions directly between customers and an information system.; In these systems one determinant of public acceptance may be the system's affect, whether that affect is “human-like” or takes some other form. Human-like affect can be portrayed by the use of multimedia presentation and interaction techniques to depict “employees” in familiar settings, as well as incorporating elements of human exchange (i.e., having the system use the customer's name in dialogs). The field of Human-Computer Interaction, which informs design decisions for such multimedia systems, is still evolving, and research on the application of multimedia to User Interfaces for automated transaction processing of this type is just beginning.; This dissertation investigates two dimensions of User Interface design that bear on the issues of emulating “natural human” transactions by using a laboratory experiment employing a 2 x 2 factorial design.; The first dimension investigated is personalization. Personalization is a theoretical construct derived from social role theory and applied in marketing. It is, briefly, the inclusion of scripted dialog crafted to make the customer feel a transaction is personalized. In addition to using the customer's name, scripts might call for ending a transaction with the ubiquitous “Have a nice day!”; The second dimension investigated is the “richness” of representation of the UI. Richness is here defined as the degree of realism of visual presentation in the interface and bears on the concept of direct manipulation. An object's richness could vary from a text based description of the object to a full motion movie depicting the object.; The design implications of the presence or absence of personalization at varying levels of richness in a prototype UI simulating a fast food ordering system are investigated. The results are presented. |
