Designing collaborative interfaces for programmable appliances: a SenSay case study

Current programmable home appliances are often difficult to use. It is now possible to make them more usable by providing them with conversational capabilities based on collaborative discourse theory. This paper discusses an approach for designing programmable appliance interfaces towards supporting person-product collaboration, A central component of the approach is an adaptive menu, called Some Things to Say (SenSay), generated using collaborative discourse theory. The SenSay provides suggestions the product may have at any time for what the user can say or do next. The paper highlights four important challenges for SenSay design, and presents the results of a study exploring one of those issues: item presentation. Results showed a relationship between item presentation style and test participants' subjective reactions to the interface, but no significant effects on participants' task performance. In reflecting on the results of the study, this paper draws some initial guidelines concerning SenSay item presentation