A User Interface Metaphor For Children Analysis, Design And Evaluation

Interface metaphor as a method of figure of speech using in the computer interface design, makes user interface be easily understood and efficiently operated by users. Nowadays, an increasing number of children are becoming the users who employ computers for learning and entertainment with today's ubiquitous computing. However, usable interactive software is difficult to be achieved because it lacks suitable interface metaphors for children understanding and exploration. In this thesis, we first argue that traditional interface metaphors built for the official usage are not well fit into the perceptual and cognitive features of children, and propose a novel interface metaphor for children, named 3IBook which is based on the paper cartoons. Additionally, the thesis discusses the interactive model based on the 3IBook interface metaphor design. Then, we demonstrate how rationality and effectiveness can be achieved for children by evaluating the realization of an interactive game in terms of this metaphor.In the analysis part of interface metaphor research and application: firstly, we explain the concepts of metaphor from the perspective of linguistics and interface metaphor from the perspective of computer science, and we also introduce the current classification of interface metaphor, including orientational metaphor, ontological metaphor and structural metaphor, and so on. Secondly, we discuss the design of interface metaphor from aspects of design steps and design contents, and expound the four-step design method we have proposed. Thirdly, we introduce some evaluation methods, aiming to evaluate the rationality and effectiveness of the interface metaphor we have proposed. At last, the thesis analyzes the current study on the using interface metaphor in the interactive software for children and the existing problems in the process of application.In the designing part of 3IBook interface metaphor, we first analyze children's characteristics from cognitive and physical aspects, and propose the child-oriented interface design goals based on the previous analysis, in order to instruct the design of the 3IBook interface metaphor according to the designing steps proposed and the current problems. Second, we introduce the design features of the 3IBook metaphor from the perspectives of structure, operation and pragmatics design. Later, the concept of interactive model and 3IBook metaphor design are integrated to discuss 3IBook interactive model from four aspects: interaction task, interaction behavior, interaction event and interaction feedback.In order to test and verify the rationality of the 3IBook design, we develop the prototype system based on the interface metaphor and interactive model of 3IBook. In system implementation part, we mainly discuss some essential algorithms such as object detecting, object tracking and gesture recognize. Among them, object detecting is realized through the improvement on the background subtraction algorithm. For object tracking, it combines Kalman filter algorithm with characteristics such as color information to track moving object. Finally, we demonstrate how the rationality and effectiveness can be achieved for children by evaluating the use of a practical application in terms of this metaphor.This paper was supported by the National High-Tech Research and Development Program of China (863 Program) (No. 2006AA01Z328), the Open Foundation of State Key Laboratory of Computer Science, the Chinese Academy of Sciences (No. SYSKF0704) and the National Natural Science Foundation of China under grant (No. 60873095).