We have recently begun to see hardware support for the tabletop user interface, offering a number of new ways for humans to interact with computers. Tabletops offer great potential for face-to-face social interaction; advances in touch technology and computer graphics provide natural ways to directly manipulate virtual objects, which we can display on the tabletop surface. Such an interface has the potential to benefit a wide range of the population and it is important that we design for usability and learnability with diverse groups of people.This paper describes the design of SharePic -a multiuser, multi-touch, gestural, collaborative digital photograph sharing application for a tabletop -and our evaluation with both young adult and elderly user groups. We describe the guidelines we have developed for the design of tabletop interfaces for a range of adult users, including elders, and the user interface we have built based on them. Novel aspects of the interface include a design strongly influenced by the metaphor of physical photographs placed on the table with interaction techniques designed to be easy to learn and easy to remember. In our evaluation, we gave users the final task of creating a digital postcard from a collage of photographs and performed a realistic think-aloud with pairs of novice participants learning together, from a tutorial script.

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This paper describes a visualisation tool, VlUM, designed to support users in scrutinising models of their interests, preferences and knowledge. We also describe MECUREO, a tool for building lightweight ontologies from online dictionaries. It enables a user to see a model describing both their interests and additional ontologically inferred interests. We report a small qualitative evaluation of this combined system. This indicates that users were able to use the system to explore models of two hypothetical users, making use of varying levels of ontological inference.

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