A framework for the descriptive specification of awareness support in multimodal user interfaces for collaborative activities

Advances related to the popularization of the Ambient Intelligence approach imply that new styles of computer–human interaction are being adopted, and, at the same time, the need of supporting activities of collaborative nature appears. In these contexts, the concept of implicit interaction appears. This concept refers to those actions that a computer considers as inputs although the user has not intended to explicitly generate an input. When dealing with implicit interaction, classic concepts about computer–human interaction are not enough, for example, when giving support to awareness. Thus, in this paper we propose a framework for helping software engineers to collect requirements and describe awareness support in systems in which collaborative activities should be supported and in which both implicit and explicit interactions may occur. As these systems may deal with both implicit and explicit interactions, their user interfaces may be of a multimodal nature. The framework includes a categorization of awareness dimensions that extends previous relevant works in the literature, a catalogue of widgets and devices for awareness support, and a technique for carrying out the specifications, which we call awareness cards. We have carried out some validations of our framework, including its application to some cases and some modeling activities with users.