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1 The In-Context Slider: A Fluid Interface Component for Visualization and Adjustment of Values while Authoring Andrew Webb and Andruid Kerne Interface Ecology Lab, Computer Science Dept., Texas A&M University, College Station, TX 77843,USA awebb, [email protected] ABSTRACT As information environments grow in complexity, we yearn for simple interfaces that streamline human cognition and effort. Users need to perform complex operations on thousands of ob-jects. Human attention and available screen real estate are con-strained. We develop a new fluid interface component for the visualization and adjustment of values while authoring, the In-Context Slider, which reduces physical effort and demand on at-tention by using fluid mouse gestures and in-context interaction. We hypothesize that such an interface will make adjusting values easier for the user. We evaluated the In-Context Slider as an af-fordance for adjusting values of interest in text and images, com-pared with a more typical interface. Participants performed faster with the In-Context Slider. They found the new interface easier to use and more natural for expressing interest. We then integrated the In-Context Slider in the information composition platform, combinFormation. Participants experienced the In-Context Slider as easier to use while developing collections to answer open-ended information discovery questions. This research is relevant for many applications in which users provide ratings, such as recommender systems, as well as for others in which users’ ad-justment of values on concurrently displayed objects is integrated with extensive interactive functionality. Categories and Subject Descriptors H5.2 [Information interfaces and presentation]: User Interfaces. - Graphical user interfaces. General Terms Design, Human Factors, Experimentation Keywords In-Context Slider, interest expression, in-context interface, fluid gestures, interaction design 1. INTRODUCTION As information environments grow in complexity, we yearn for simple interfaces that streamline human cognition and effort. Interactive spaces contain thousands of objects. Users need to perform complex operations on individual objects and subsets. The limits of human attention and available screen real estate constrain the design solution space. We need to discover new interface components, which recognize and take into account the context of the user’s situated task. In-context interfaces address these design issues by providing affordances in-place. Activation is transitory, that is, they only appear when necessary and re-quested. Clear mappings are based on fluid gestures. Activation rules are based on the user’s context. The present research is concerned with contextualized visualiza-tion and adjustment of a one-dimensional value. The task context integrates authoring and getting recommendations. It is conducted either in a space of many graphical objects, or in a text editor. With each graphical object or word, a value is associated. The set of these values constitutes the profile of user interests. Eliciting the user’s input on ratings is sufficiently difficult that it proves to be a barrier of participation in many recommender systems [3, 11]. We redefine providing ratings in a human-centered way, as “ex-pressing interest.” We develop a fluid in-context interface for interest expression, which can be tightly integrated into other user tasks, such as authoring and editing of textual and visual informa-tion. Our hypothesis is that expressive interaction will be in-creased by reducing user effort and increasing feedback. A typical interface design for adjusting a value associated with a graphic object or word is to display an input interface (e.g. slider or text field) inside a pop-up window that is often activated by selecting from a menu or sidebar. The pop-up can occlude the user’s context (see Figure 1) or appear outside the current point of focus. Some alternative interface design methods dedicate real estate. Others require the user to press hot keys that lack visibility. We develop the In-Context Slider, a fluid transitory affordance for visualization and adjustment of values. We describe the role of the In-Context Slider in the integration of interest expression with authoring. We present an evaluation based on text-editing and image ranking tasks. We introduce the combinFormation mixed-initiative information composition platform [9], and how the In-Context Slider fulfills interest expression needs within that plat-form. The platform plays a key role in information discovery tasks performed by 1000 undergraduate students annually. The student users are novices, with no particular computing background. We present user experiences of expressing interest to represent collec-tions with composition. We then review related work and con-clude by deriving implications of this research. 2. THE IN-CONTEXT SLIDER The In-Context Slider is a user interface component that recog-nizes aspects of the user’s situated task to provide transitory af-fordances in proximity to the focus object to support the adjust-ment of a value through fluid movements. We arrived at this solu-tion through a human-centered iterative design process. The goal of the design process was to create a better interface for interest expression in combinFormation while not disrupting the user’s experience of authoring compositions. Keep this space free for the ACM copyright notice.2 2.1 Layered Activation What makes an in-context interface fluid is the ability to activate layers of the interface at the point of focus, in the midst of an interactive space, through simple gestures. Clear affordances are required to cue the user about how to trigger each successive layer. We call these affordances activators. An activator provides fluid transitions between the layers of interaction. Activation af-fordances must be designed so that their presence minimally dis-rupts other constituent functionalities of the context. Through layered


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