A Method for an Agile, User Centered Development of Natural User Interfaces

In this work we introduce a novel iterative and user-centered method to facilitate the development of intuitive and natural user interfaces. To showcase our agile procedure we conducted an explorative user study, which focusses on intuitive and seamless gestures for controlling appliances in smart environments. We found a variety of individual user preferences, which indicates the need of a highly personalized interaction control. Furthermore, we implemented one of the resulting gesture sets using our multimodal integration platform for human computer interaction studies and provided a brief user test to validate our first prototype. The platform enables a rapid implementation cycle as well as a lightweight adaptation to technological advantages. A reliable comparison of different gestures, sensors and algorithms is provided by the combination of the explorative study design and a straightforward implementation. Moreover, the presented method allows an easy adaptation to user's needs, due to the included interview and quick implementation cycle.