Authors:
Dimitrios Rigas
and
Nikolaos Gazepidis
Affiliation:
School of Informatics, University of Bradford, United Kingdom
Keyword(s):
E-Business systems, Multi-Modal stimuli, Usability, Facial Expressions, Body Language, User Interfaces.
Related
Ontology
Subjects/Areas/Topics:
Business and Social Applications
;
Communication and Software Infrastructure
;
e-Business
;
e-Commerce and e-Business: B2B and B2C
;
e-Marketing and Consumer Behaviour
;
Enterprise Information Systems
;
e-Retailing and Web Design
;
Global Communication Information Systems and Services
;
Information and Systems Security
;
Telecommunications
;
Web and Mobile Business Systems and Services
Abstract:
This paper describes an initial survey and an experiment that investigate the use of facial expressions and body language in e-Business applications. Our aim in this research is to investigate the usability aspects of B2C interfaces that utilise speech, non-speech, avatars with facial expressions and gestures in addition to the typical visual graphical metaphors that are currently used. The initial survey was performed with 25 users and the main experiment with 42 users. Results were encouraging and enabled us to understand some of the research issues involved in the use of multimodal metaphors in e-Business. The results indicated that avatars with facial expressions were most preferred by users for e-transactions and the full animated body was the second most preferred option by the users. The text was the least preferred option. These findings enabled us to understand several design issues of multimodal systems for e-Business applications. For example there were issues of multimoda
l presentation and combination of the different modalities, e.g. speech, avatars, facial expressions, graphics, and text.
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