day 1 seminar

Also attended a debate on new technologies for making products easier to understand and use. The CE industry is now focusing on "ease of use" and an improved "user experience" to make products more competitive. This session examined new interface and interoperability guidelines to help create full-functioning products that reduce new return rates and are usable from the box by more than the top 30-40 percent of consumers.
http://www.cesweb.org/attendees/conferences/search/session_detail.asp?ID_session=IA11

Vanderheide said that the User Interface Socket could become a standard for improving the user experience. It still however needs wider industry participation if it is to become a true standard. (see
http://www.incits.org/tc_home/v2htm/docs/V2/03-0093/v2030093r.html) It could be the basis of an Intermode consul and maturity of this type of technology is vital for a lot of future devices success. It may also contribute to the successful roll-out of applications such as natural language speech input and output.
Sorenson said the gradual introduction of new interface upgrades or the use of incremental updates mitigates risk i.e. A lot of money is not spent developing a new user interface which relies upon a new technology which may not yet work. He also said that there were still many problems around what devices are called and user concepts of what the device can or is supposed to do. He believed that the symantic web and other existing standards could be useful but the industry needed to sit down “around a table” more to discuss customer expectations and needs.
Rich said the speech interface remains an issue – whilst there are other ways of communicating with devices. Whilst other ways of communicating with devices need to be developed further many users expect truly intelligent objects to understand language – we expect from of peers and siblings.