Affordances in Conversational Interactions with Multimodal QA Systems

Implementation of adequate conversational structures is a key issue in developing successful interactive user interfaces. A way of testing the adequacy of the structures is to prove the correct orientation of each communicative action towards a preceding action. We refer to this orientation leading to a certain response as the affordance of the communicative action. In this paper we present a case study where affordances of implemented conversational structures (including verbal and graphical elements) in a multimodal medical QA system are identified applying Conversation Analysis (CA) tools and tested using the Cognitive Walkthrough (CW) method. The CW method was modified to fit the conversational approach and tested with five expert evaluators. Results showed that the affordance analysis helps detecting inefficient constructions leading to disruptions in the dialog flow, spots unnecessary functions and provides important insights on systems easy-of-use.