Abstract

Language Technology (LT) based applications become more popular as technology improves. Prototyping early in the design process is critical for the development of high quality applications. It is difficult, however, to do low-fidelity prototyping (e.g. paper prototyping) of applications based on LT. One technique that has been used for this kind of prototyping is Wizard of Oz (WOZ). An effective interface to support the task of the wizard is, however, crucial. While several wizard interfaces have been built to date, most of them were designed for specific experiments. The more general issue of supporting the sometimes highly demanding cognitive task of the wizard has remained largely unexplored. In my talk I want to report on work in progress that explores the wizard task and aims at defining a generic wizard user interface layout that can be used in different experimental settings using different Language Technology Components. I will talk about a first WOZ experiment in which different wizards were observed and their behaviour was analysed. Finally I will show how the results of this experiment were combined with sketching in order to identify high-level concepts for a future generic wizard interface.