Contextual awareness as measure of human-information interaction in usability and design

Abstract

Contextual awareness (CA) [3] provides a way of thinking about the communication quality of the human-information interaction (HII) aspects of a design [4]. Understanding information in complex situations is essentially always cognitively-based rather than physically-based (although physical interaction may be required to control the situation). Gaining that understanding within a complex situation requires mentally integrating many pieces of information, which requires the user knows the information exists, what it means, and how it is interrelated to other pieces of information. The design and testing of complex information systems and effectively interacting with them require a different approach than working with simply information [1, 11]. © 2011 Springer-Verlag.