Evaluating tangible objects for multimodal interaction design

The design of applications with multimodal interfaces currently implies complex handcrafting by interface experts, lack of compliance with industry standards of cost effectiveness, maintenance and user focus such as those achieved by the current User-Centered Design methods. This paper presents an initial step towards a design by-example approach, whereby the end-user’s multimodal preferences for a specific domain can be learned during the design phase. In particular, we propose to alleviate the design costs by using tangible objects for designing multimodal user interfaces. Heuristic evaluation shows small to no effect on the user’s preferred multimodal behaviour when comparing tangible and virtual objects during design.