Discovery:

Promoting and improving discoverability in interactive systems

Latest news:

2023 Dec. 21st:

Very happy for Eva Mackamul successfully defended her PhD on Investigating the Influence of Visual Signifiers to Foster the Discovery of Touch-Based Interactions. Congratulations Dr. Mackamul. Wish you the best in the future.

2023 Sep. 1:

Eva Mackamul and Vincent Lambert will present at the end of the month their work on the visual presentation of interaction possibilities at the Mobile HCI 23 conference in Athens. Great job Eva and Vincent!

2022 Nov. 1:

Raphaël starts PhD at Inria co-funded by the ANR and the Région Hauts-de-France, to study how online tutorials could be leveraged to foster the discovery of novel features. Welcome Raphaël!

Discovery is a project funded by The French National Research Agency (ANR) under the funding scheme code ANR-19-CE33-0006. The project started in January 2020 for an initial duration of 4 years. It investigates a fundamental limitation in the way interactive systems are usually designed, as in practice they do not tend to foster the discovery of their input methods (operations that can be used to communicate with the system) and corresponding features (commands and functionalities that the system supports). Indeed, advances in academic and industrial HCI research have led to the recent release of novel commercial interactive systems (e.g. smartphones, smartwatches, VR) relying on various input methods, and we argue that a poor discoverability of these input methods can significantly impact the adoption of these interactive systems.

We will investigate this issue with a focus on three main objectives:

  • Providing fundamental knowledge on human factors influencing the discovery of input methods
  • Defining experimental protocols adapted to the evaluation of discoverability
  • Proposing UI refinements and reflective interfaces that would foster the discovery of input methods