Multimodal Output Management - Man-Machine Dialogue: Design and Challenges - page 148

communication preferences as they have been defined and identified during the
interaction:
- present well with a more refined use of the user's expectations;
- present well to prioritize an adequate perception of the message;
- present well to prioritize the adequate reactions on the user's part.
9.1.2. Human factors for multimedia presentation
Adapting to the user's physical and cognitive abilities falls within the
scope of human factors (see the beginning of section 2.1). This is the field of
cognitive psychology and especially cognitive ergonomics [GAO 06], with
preoccupations such as that of cognitive load management, user memory and
attention span and preoccupations that can be usefully applied to MMD, (see
Chapter 9 of [COH 04]). This adaptation completes that explored by plastic
MMI (section 2.3.2), with various aspects characterizing the MMI
adaptability and more generally that of MMD, to terminals, user rights (right
of access to certain pieces of information and not others), the roles of the user
(depending on his/her role in task resolution, some pieces of information are
more important than others) and preferences: preferences on data filtering, on
modalities to be prioritized or on the ways to highlight part of the
information. All these processes intervene in the allocation of information to
communication channels and the highlighting of specific pieces of
information.
To carry these processes out, a first set of parameters covers the
characteristics of the information to be transmitted, with three main categories:
semantic content, pragmatic aspects and anchoring in the dialogue history.
Among all these elements, which create the semantic content, we will note
the following essential parameters:
- the level of criticality, which can lead to a choice to emphasize it greatly;
- the level of urgency, which can block all the current processes to force
the user to react immediately;
- the complexity of the information: nature of the data structure, volume
and number of elements involved;
- the constitution of information: discrete or continuous, linguistic,
numbered, spread over one, two or three dimensions;