The author proposed an idea about combining both automated services and direct manipulation in developing user interfaces. With the consideration about 12 factors include developing significant value-added automation, uncertainty about a user’s goals, user’s attention, costs, benefits, dialog and so on, the author did research on the Lookout system, which is mixed-initiative user interfaces that enable users and intelligent agents to collaborate efficiently. The factors of value-added calendaring and scheduling service, decision making under uncertainty, multiple interaction modalities and handling invocation failures are evaluated, and future expectations are set. After the discussion about costs and benefits and the research on the Lookout system, the combination of reasoning machinery and direct manipulation was proved to have a promising chance for improving human-computer interaction.
Reflection:
Though this paper is written in 1999, the idea behind the paper is still valuable now. The combination of automated services and direct manipulation has been widely applied to current user-interfaces. For example, in designing of the user-interface of Taobao, the developers built numerous modules. The modules can be arranged by the users according to their preference and in the meantime, there is an AI system that will arrange the modules according to the search history and the user actions. With the combination of these two arrangements, user experience is improved significantly. Apart from Taobao, most current popular applications or websites have similar systems that were recommended by this paper written in 1999. Apart from this paper, there must be other old papers which contain valuable ideas nowadays. For this reason, there is a necessity for the current researchers to review old papers regularly.
It is for sure that we need to read up-to-date papers, which represent the current state-of-the-art. However, some of the ideas prompted in the old papers still work now. Some of the ideas proposed in these papers were impossible to be implemented at that time. As a result, the papers were ignored by other researchers. However, with the development of technology, we should review the papers which propose ideas that were not possible to implement from time to time. Someday, these not real ideas may become true with technology development.
Apart from the idea proposed in the paper, I have another thought about how the author can think about this idea. At that time, researchers focused on both the tools for users to directly manipulate user-interfaces and automated services which can sense user activity and take automated actions. However, researches that focus on the combination of the two aspects are limited. The author considered from both sides and directed a new way for the improvement of human-computer interaction. Similarly, if we can combine two up-to-date research topics which have similarity, novel solutions to some of the current challenges may be proposed and this may be applied in our course projects.
Question:
Which applications applied this proposed approach combining both automated services and direct manipulation?
What should we do if the agent’s decision is conflicted with the user’s decision?
Is it ethical for agents to track user activities? If not, how can agents service automatically?
I think question 3 is a really interesting question, ethic is a question that must be considered when we design a program or system. Generally, I think that the program will ask the user to record the user ’s operation or the calculate user ’s operations. But in fact, most people will not read these terms carefully. So I think more research is needed on this aspect and management needs to be strengthened in the future,