“A multiple card-sorting task is described for the purpose of exploring and understanding the User Experience. This method is part of a Personal Construct Theory approach, and is validated with experimental data that show insight into how users conceptualise their experience with MP3 players, as represented by photographs. This approach allows access to users’ constructs and categories, which enables access to their subjective meanings and experience.”
“We examine how ambient displays can augment social television. Social TV 2 is an interactive television solution that incorporates two ambient displays to convey to participants an aggregate view of their friends' current TV-watching status. Social TV 2 also allows users to see which television shows friends and family are watching and send lightweight messages from within the TV-viewing experience. Through a two-week field study we found the ambient displays to be an integral part of the experience. We present the results of our field study with a discussion of the implications for future social systems in the home.”
“Many sites on the web offer collaborative databases that catalog items such as bands, events, products, or software modules. Conversation pivots allow readers to navigate from pages about these items to conversations about them on the same site or elsewhere on the Internet. Double pivots allow readers to navigate from item pages to pages about other items mentioned in the same conversations. Using text mining techniques specific to the collection it is possible to find references to collected items in online conversations. We implemented conversation pivots for the CPAN archive of Perl modules, and for Drupal.org, the reference site for the Drupal content management system.”
“Entering search terms on mobile phones is a time consuming and cumbersome task. In this paper, we explore the usage patterns of query entry interfaces that display suggestions. Our primary goal is to build a usage model of query suggestions in order to provide user interface guidelines for mobile text prediction interfaces. We find that users who were asked to enter queries on a search interface with query suggestions rated their workload lower and their enjoyment higher. They also saved, on average, approximately half of the key presses compared to users who were not shown suggestions, despite no associated decrease in time to enter a query. Surprisingly, users also accepted suggestions when the process of doing so resulted in an increase in the number of total key presses.”
“Web 2.0 gives people a substantial role in content and metadata creation. New interpersonal connections are formed and existing connections become evident through Web 2.0 services. This newly created social network (SN) spans across multiple services and aggregating it could bring great value. In this work we present SONAR, an API for gathering and sharing SN information. We give a detailed description of SONAR, demonstrate its potential value through user scenarios, and show results from experiments we conducted with a SONAR-based social networking application. These suggest that aggregating SN information across diverse data sources enriches the SN picture and makes it more complete and useful for the end user.”
“This paper investigates the uses of social networking site Facebook, and the gratifications users derive from those uses. In the first study, 137 users generated words or phrases to describe how they used Facebook, and what they enjoyed about their use. These phrases were coded into 46 items which were completed by 241 Facebook users in Study 2. Factor analysis identified seven unique uses and gratifications: social connection, shared identities, content, social investigation, social network surfing and status updating. User demographics, site visit patterns and the use of privacy settings were associated with different uses and gratifications.”
“Instructor/student interaction in e-learning environments can positively impact both student learning and instructor satisfaction. In online webcast lectures, however, interaction can be difficult because instructors lack basic awareness information about their remote students. Our goal is to better understand the kinds of awareness information that instructors should have if they are to interact frequently and effectively with their students in e-learning environments. We conducted an exploratory study -- via interviews and observations -- of instructor attention in face-to-face classrooms at a large university. Our results imply that a webcast system should provide instructors with overview and detailed data about their students, but that this detailed information should not be displayed publicly.”
“Wikis are collaborative systems in which virtually anyone can edit anything. Although wikis have become highly popular in many domains, their mutable nature often leads them to be distrusted as a reliable source of information. Here we describe a social dynamic analysis tool called WikiDashboard which aims to improve social transparency and accountability on Wikipedia articles. Early reactions from users suggest that the increased transparency afforded by the tool can improve the interpretation, communication, and trustworthiness of Wikipedia articles.”
“Social tagging systems provide users with the opportunity to employ tags in a communicative manner. To explore the use of tags for communication in these systems, we report results from 33 user interviews and employ the concept of social roles to describe audience-oriented tagging, including roles of community-seeker, community-builder, evangelist, publisher, and team-leader. These roles contribute to our understanding of the motivations and rationales behind social tagging in an international company, and suggest new features and services to support social software in the enterprise.”
“Non-expert users face a dilemma when making security decisions. Their security often cannot be fully automated for them, yet they generally lack both the motivation and technical knowledge to make informed security decisions on their own. To help users with this dilemma, we present a novel security user interface called Sesame. Sesame uses a concrete, spatial extension of the desktop metaphor to provide users with the security-related, visualized system-level information they need to make more informed decisions. It also provides users with actionable controls to affect a system's security state. Sesame graphically facilitates users' comprehension in making these decisions, and in doing so helps to lower the bar for motivating them to participate in the security of their system. In a controlled study, users with Sesame were found to make fewer errors than a control group which suggests that our novel security interface is a viable alternative approach to helping users with their dilemma.”
“With the proliferation of computer security threats on the Internet, especially threats such as worms that automatically exploit software flaws, it is becoming more and more important that home users keep their computers secure from known software vulnerabilities. Unfortunately, keeping software up-to-date is notoriously difficult for home users. This paper introduces TALC, a system to encourage and help home users patch vulnerable software. TALC increases home users' awareness of software vulnerabilities and their motivation to patch their software; it does so by detecting unpatched software and then drawing graffiti on their computer's background wallpaper image to denote potential vulnerabilities. Users can "clean up" the graffiti by applying necessary patches, which TALC makes possible by assisting in the software patching process.”
“Many popular web browsers are now including active phishing warnings after previous research has shown that passive warnings are often ignored. In this laboratory study we examine the effectiveness of these warnings and examine if, how, and why they fail users. We simulated a spear phishing attack to expose users to browser warnings. We found that 97% of our sixty participants fell for at least one of the phishing messages that we sent them. However, we also found that when presented with the active warnings, 79% of participants heeded them, which was not the case for the passive warning that we tested -- where only one participant heeded the warnings. Using a model from the warning sciences we analyzed how users perceive warning messages and offer suggestions for creating more effective warning messages within the phishing context.”
“We performed an empirical study to investigate whether the context of interruptions makes a difference. We found that context does not make a difference but surprisingly, people completed interrupted tasks in less time with no difference in quality. Our data suggests that people compensate for interruptions by working faster, but this comes at a price: experiencing more stress, higher frustration, time pressure and effort. Individual differences exist in the management of interruptions: personality measures of openness to experience and need for personal structure predict disruption costs of interruptions. We discuss implications for how system design can support interrupted work.”
“An important question for HCI is to understand how and why visual search strategy is adapted to the demands imposed by the task of searching the results of a search engine. There is emerging evidence that a key part of the answer concerns the expected information gain of each of the set of available information gathering actions. We build on previous research to show that people are acutely sensitive to differences in the spacing and in the number of items returned by the search engine. These factors cause shifts in the efficiency of the available information gathering actions. We focus on an image browsing task, and show that, as a consequence of changes to the efficiency of available actions, people make small but significant changes to eye-movement strategy.”
“Collaborative filtering (CF) has been successfully deployed over the years to compute predictions on items based on a user's correlation with a set of peers. The black-box nature of most CF applications leave the user wondering how the system arrived at its recommendation. This note introduces PeerChooser, a collaborative recommender system with an interactive graphical explanation interface. Users are provided with a visual explanation of the CF process and opportunity to manipulate their neighborhood at varying levels of granularity to reflect aspects of their current requirements. In this manner we overcome the problem of redundant profile information in CF systems, in addition to providing an explanation interface. Our layout algorithm produces an exact, noiseless graph representation of the underlying correlations between users. PeerChooser's prediction component uses this graph directly to yield the same results as the benchmark. User's then improve on these predictions by tweaking the graph to their current requirements. We present a user-survey in which PeerChooser compares favorably against a benchmark CF algorithm.”
“Expertise locator systems have been designed to help find experts within organizations. While there are many examples of these systems in the literature, there has not been any systematic analysis of the factors that predict whether a particular expertise search result will be selected for further exploration. This paper describes a study of 67 employees from 21 countries that performed a specific expertise search to find an expert using an expertise locator system. Rank order and social connection information displayed in snippets of search results were found to significantly predict whether a user considers a particular search result for further exploration. Implications for the design of expertise location systems and future research directions are discussed.”
“It is well established that there is a need to find experts to get answers or advice. A variety of expertise locator tools have emerged to help locate the right person. But there is little systematic study on what people are really looking for when such systems are used and how external factors such as job role may shape that search. We conducted a study of 75 employees who were current users of an expertise locator system. An analysis of the reasons for their search revealed that people in client facing roles are primarily seeking to have a dialog with an expert, while others are just as likely to seek answers to technical questions. We also surveyed various tools for finding experts and found that corporate directories and personal networks were most often cited as alternatives to an expertise locator. We discuss the implications of these results for the design of tools for finding experts and expert knowledge.”
“We examine tagging behavior on Flickr, a public photo-sharing website. We build on previous qualitative research that exposed a taxonomy of tagging motivations, as well as on social presence research. The motivation taxonomy suggests that motivations for tagging are tied to the intended target audience of the tags -- the users themselves, family and friends, or the general public. Using multiple data sources, including a survey and independent system data, we examine which motivations are associated with tagging level, and estimate the magnitude of their contribution. We find that the levels of the Self and Public motivations, together with social presence indicators, are positively correlated with tagging level; Family & Friends motivations are not significantly correlated with tagging. The findings and the use of survey method carry implications for designers of tagging and other social systems on the web.”
“In this paper, we report on design-oriented fieldwork and design research conducted over a six-month period in urban centers in the United States and Kenya. The contributions of this work for the CHI/CSCW community are empirical and methodological. First, we describe how recent design discourse around "designing technology for religion" creates an artificial distinction between instrumental and religious ICT use, particularly in developing regions. As illustrative examples, we relate three themes developed in the course of our fieldwork, which we term mindfulness, watchfulness, and embeddedness, to both "secular" and "religious" aspects of life in the communities studied. Second, we make a methodological contribution by describing how we used design sketches of speculative design concepts to extend and complement our fieldwork. By producing these sketches and soliciting feedback, we elicited additional data about how participants viewed the relationship between religion and ICT and prompted self-reflection on our own ideas.”
“Wikis are sites that support the development of emergent, collective infrastructures that are highly flexible and open, suggesting that the systems that use them will be egalitarian, free, and unstructured. Yet it is apparent that the flexible infrastructure of wikis allows the development and deployment of a wide range of structures. However, we find that the policies in Wikipedia and the systems and mechanisms that operate around them are multi-faceted. In this descriptive study, we draw on prior work on rules and policies in organizations to propose and apply a conceptual framework for understanding the natures and roles of policies in wikis. We conclude that wikis are capable of supporting a broader range of structures and activities than other collaborative platforms. Wikis allow for and, in fact, facilitate the creation of policies that serve a wide variety of functions.”
“Current practice in Human Computer Interaction as encouraged by educational institutes, academic review processes, and institutions with usability groups advocate usability evaluation as a critical part of every design process. This is for good reason: usability evaluation has a significant role to play when conditions warrant it. Yet evaluation can be ineffective and even harmful if naively done 'by rule' rather than 'by thought'. If done during early stage design, it can mute creative ideas that do not conform to current interface norms. If done to test radical innovations, the many interface issues that would likely arise from an immature technology can quash what could have been an inspired vision. If done to validate an academic prototype, it may incorrectly suggest a design's scientific worthiness rather than offer a meaningful critique of how it would be adopted and used in everyday practice. If done without regard to how cultures adopt technology over time, then today's reluctant reactions by users will forestall tomorrow's eager acceptance. The choice of evaluation methodology -- if any -- must arise from and be appropriate for the actual problem or research question under consideration.”
“Within the last decade, blogs have become an important element of popular culture, mass media, and the daily lives of countless Internet users. Despite the medium's interactive nature, most research on blogs focuses on either the blog itself or the blogger, rarely if at all focusing on the reader's impact. In order to gain a better understanding of the social practice of blogging, we must take into account the role, contributions, and significance of the reader. This paper presents the findings of a qualitative study of blog readers, including common blog reading practices, some of the dimensions along which reading practices vary, relationships between identity presentation and perception, the interpretation of temporality, and the ways in which readers feel that they are a part of the blogs they read. It also describes similarities to, and discrepancies with, previous work, and suggests a number of directions and implications for future work on blogging.”
“Being able to automatically perceive a variety of emotions from text alone has potentially important applications in CMC and HCI that range from identifying mood from online posts to enabling dynamically adaptive interfaces. However, such ability has not been proven in human raters or computational systems. Here we examine the ability of naive raters of emotion to detect one of eight emotional categories from 50 and 200 word samples of real blog text. Using expert raters as a 'gold standard', naive-expert rater agreement increased with longer texts, and was high for ratings of joy, disgust, anger and anticipation, but low for acceptance and 'neutral' texts. We discuss these findings in light of theories of CMC and potential applications in HCI.”
“We present a large-scale analysis of the content of weblogs dating back to the release of the Blogger program in 1999. Over one million blogs were analyzed from their conception through June 2006. These data was submitted to the Text Analysis: Word Counts program [12], which conducted a word-count analysis using Linguistic Inquiry and Word Counts (LIWC) dictionaries [20] to provide and analyze a representative sample of blogger word usage. Covariation among LIWC dictionaries suggests that blogs vary along five psychologically relevant linguistic dimensions: Melancholy, Socialness, Ranting, Metaphysicality, and Work-Relatedness. These variables and others were subjected to a cluster analysis in an attempt to extract natural usage groups to inform design of blogging systems, the results of which were mixed.”
“What issues arise when designing and deploying tangibles for learning in long term evaluations? This paper reports on a series of studies in which the Topobo system, a 3D tangible construction kit with the ability to record and playback motion, was provided to educators and designers to use over extended periods of time in the context of their day-to-day work. Tangibles for learning -- like all educational materials -- must be evaluated in relation both to the student and the teacher, but most studies of tangibles for learning focus on the student as user. Here, we focus on the conception of the educator, and their use of the tangible interface in the absence of an inventor or HCI researcher. The results of this study identify design and pedagogical issues that arise in response to distribution of a tangible for learning in different educational environments.”
“Car drivers are nowadays offered a wide array of in-vehicle systems i.e. route guidance systems, climate controls, music players. Such in-vehicle systems often require the driver's visual attention, but visual workload has shown significant less eyes-on-the-road time and affects driving performance. In this paper, we illustrate and compare three different interaction techniques for in-vehicle systems. We refer to them as tactile, touch, and gesture interaction. The focus of the techniques is the effects on drivers while driving cars. We evaluated the interaction techniques with 16 subjects in two settings. Our results showed that gesture interaction has a significant effect on the number of driver eye glances especially eye fixations of more seconds. However, gesture interaction still required rapid eye glances for hand/eye coordination. On the other hand, touch interaction leads to fast and efficient task completion while tactile interaction seemed inferior to the two other interaction techniques.”
“We present new findings on commonalities and differences between touch and mouse input for co-located interaction between teams of two people who know each other. Twenty-two participants were instructed to work as co-located pairs on three sets of two concurrent digital jigsaw puzzles, displayed on a horizontal tabletop that allows for multiple concurrent input devices. They were advised to use their preference for, or any combination of, direct (touch) and indirect (mouse) input device to achieve the goal. We increased the task?s difficulty: In the second and third puzzle task, participants had to discover that pieces were mixed up between the two puzzle stacks. We used this 'hidden task' to trigger spontaneous transitions from individual to collaborative work. Based on a qualitative analysis of individual interaction trajectories of direct and indirect input devices, we discuss patterns of collaboration. This furthers scientific understanding of co-located collaboration with multiple input devices.”
“Liquid layout of web browser elements enables enterprise applications to adapt to larger windows on larger displays, but guidelines are needed to define layout rules for widescreen page content. The present study considers the impact of relative portlet distance and orientation in enterprise-type tasks. Eighteen analysts completed tasks in which critical information was located in two portlets separated by defined distances and orientations. Analysis of completion times, assists, errors, and subjective scales revealed a significant advantage for wider, horizontal information layouts over narrower, vertical layouts. The difference persisted, even when accounting for the influence of vertical scrolling. Horizontal layout in these dashboard-style tasks had a 5%-25% time savings over vertical layout, as separation distances increased to 2000 pixels. Differences in horizontal and vertical eye movement accuracy and velocity could account for these results. Widescreen design guidelines should include a preference for horizontal layout as horizontal screen distances increase.”
“This paper presents a context-aware mobile recommender system, codenamed Magitti. Magitti is unique in that it infers user activity from context and patterns of user behavior and, without its user having to issue a query, automatically generates recommendations for content matching. Extensive field studies of leisure time practices in an urban setting (Tokyo) motivated the idea, shaped the details of its design and provided data describing typical behavior patterns. The paper describes the fieldwork, user interface, system components and functionality, and an evaluation of the Magitti prototype.”
“Fairground: Thrill Laboratory was a series of live events that augmented the experience of amusement rides. A wearable telemetry system captured video, audio, heart-rate and acceleration data, streaming them live to spectator interfaces and a watching audience. In this paper, we present a study of this event, which draws on video recordings and post-event interviews, and which highlights the experiences of riders, spectators and ride operators. Our study shows how the telemetry system transformed riders into performers, spectators into an audience, and how the role of ride operator began to include aspects of orchestration, with the relationship between all three roles also transformed. Critically, the introduction of a telemetry system seems to have had the potential to re-connect riders/performers back to operators/orchestrators and spectators/audience, re-introducing a closer relationship that used to be available with smaller rides. Introducing telemetry to a real-world situation also creates significant complexity, which we illustrate by focussing on a moment of perceived crisis.”
“Geocaching is a location-based activity that has been practiced for a number of years. As a sustained and established activity it represents an important opportunity for understanding everyday practices and motivations that can build up around a location-based activity. We present findings from a field study of everyday geocaching behaviour. In contrast to previous work, we take a broad perspective on the activity focussing beyond the in situ consumption of these experiences. We look too at the practices and motivations surrounding participants' creation of these experiences. Further we examine these behaviours within the social context of the on-line community that provides a significant basis for many of these behaviours. We use the findings to discuss broader implications for the design of future location-based experiences.”
“Users are now performing more sophisticated web tasks. In this work, we explore web tasks that require multiple web sessions to complete (multi-session tasks) to satisfy a goal. We conducted a web-based diary study and a field study that used a customized version of Firefox which logged the participants' interactions for multi-session tasks and all their web activity. We found that multi-session tasks occur frequently and that users utilize a variety of browser tools and actions to help complete these tasks.”
“Our work examines Web revisitation patterns. Everybody revisits Web pages, but their reasons for doing so can differ depending on the particular Web page, their topic of interest, and their intent. To characterize how people revisit Web content, we analyzed five weeks of Web interaction logs of over 612,000 users. We supplemented these findings by a survey intended to identify the intent behind the observed revisitation. Our analysis reveals four primary revisitation patterns, each with unique behavioral, content, and structural characteristics. Through our analysis we illustrate how understanding revisitation patterns can enable Web sites to provide improved navigation, Web browsers to predict users' destinations, and search engines to better support fast, fresh, and effective finding and re-finding.”
“Current user interfaces for Web search, including browsers and search engine sites, typically treat search as a transient activity. However, people often conduct complex, multi-query investigations that may span long durations and may be interrupted by other tasks. In this paper, we first present the results of a survey of users' search habits, which show that many search tasks span long periods of time. We then introduce SearchBar, a system for proactively and persistently storing query histories, browsing histories, and users' notes and ratings in an interrelated fashion. SearchBar supports multi-session investigations by assisting with task context resumption and information re-finding. We describe a user study comparing use of SearchBar to status-quo tools such as browser histories, and discuss our findings, which show that users find SearchBar valuable for task reacquisition. Our study also reveals the strategies employed by users of status-quo tools for handling multi-query, multi-session search tasks.”
“In this paper we suggest the use of tangible user interfaces (TUIs) for human-robot interaction (HRI) applications. We discuss the potential benefits of this approach while focusing on low-level of autonomy tasks. We present an experimental robotic interaction test bed to support our investigation. We use the test bed to explore two HRI-related task-sets: robotic navigation control and robotic posture control. We discuss the implementation of these two task-sets using an AIBO" robot dog. Both tasks were mapped to two different robotic control interfaces: keypad interface which resembles the interaction approach currently common in HRI, and a gesture input mechanism based on Nintendo Wii" game controllers. We discuss the interfaces implementation and conclude with a detailed user study for evaluating these different HRI techniques in the two robotic tasks-sets.”
“To design information visualization tools for collaborative use, we need to understand how teams engage with visualizations during their information analysis process. We report on an exploratory study of individuals, pairs, and triples engaged in information analysis tasks using paper-based visualizations. From our study results, we derive a framework that captures the analysis activities of co-located teams and individuals. Comparing this framework with existing models of the information analysis process suggests that information visualization tools may benefit from providing a flexible temporal flow of analysis actions.”
“Information visualizations can improve collaborative problem solving, but this improvement may depend on whether visualizations promote communication. In an experiment on the effect of network visualizations, remote pairs worked synchronously to identify a serial killer. They discussed disparate evidence distributed across the pair using IM. Four conditions, respectively, offered (a) spreadsheet only (controls), (b) individual unshared visualizations, (c) view-only shared visualizations, and (d) a full-access shared visualization of all evidence. We examined collaborative performance, use of the visualization tool, and communication as a function of condition. All visualization conditions improved remote collaborators' performance over the control condition. Full access to a shared visualization best facilitated remote collaboration by encouraging tool use and fostering discussion between the partners. Shared visualization without full access impaired performance somewhat and made communication even more vital to identifying the serial killer. This study provides direct evidence of visualization tool features and partner behavior that promote collaboration.”
“This paper presents a new information visualization framework that supports the analytical reasoning process. It consists of three views -- a data view, a knowledge view and a navigation view. The data view offers interactive information visualization tools. The knowledge view enables the analyst to record analysis artifacts such as findings, hypotheses and so on. The navigation view provides an overview of the exploration process by capturing the visualization states automatically. An analysis artifact recorded in the knowledge view can be linked to a visualization state in the navigation view. The analyst can revisit a visualization state from both the navigation and knowledge views to review the analysis and reuse it to look for alternate views. The whole analysis process can be saved along with the synthesized information. We present a user study and discuss the perceived usefulness of a prototype based on this framework that we have developed.”
“Adaptive personalization, where the system adapts the interface to a user's needs, has the potential for significant performance benefits on small screen devices. However, research on adaptive interfaces has almost exclusively focused on desktop displays. To explore how well previous findings generalize to small screen devices, we conducted a study with 36 subjects to compare adaptive interfaces for small and desktop-sized screens. Results show that high accuracy adaptive menus have an even larger positive impact on performance and satisfaction when screen real estate is constrained. The drawback of the high accuracy menus, however, is that they reduce the user's awareness of the full set of items in the interface, potentially making it more difficult for users to learn about new features.”
“We evaluate two systems for automatically generating personalized interfaces adapted to the individual motor capabilities of users with motor impairments. The first system, SUPPLE, adapts to users' capabilities indirectly by first using the ARNAULD preference elicitation engine to model a user's preferences regarding how he or she likes the interfaces to be created. The second system, SUPPLE++, models a user's motor abilities directly from a set of one-time motor performance tests. In a study comparing these approaches to baseline interfaces, participants with motor impairments were 26.4% faster using ability-based user interfaces generated by SUPPLE++. They also made 73% fewer errors, strongly preferred those interfaces to the manufacturers' defaults, and found them more efficient, easier to use, and much less physically tiring. These findings indicate that rather than requiring some users with motor impairments to adapt themselves to software using separate assistive technologies, software can now adapt itself to the capabilities of its users.”
“Coarse-grained approaches to customization allow the user to enable or disable groups of features at once, rather than individual features. While this may reduce the complexity of customization and encourage more users to customize, the research challenges of designing such approaches have not been fully explored. To address this limitation, we conducted an interview study with 14 professional software developers who use an integrated development environment that provides a role-based, coarse-grained approach to customization. We identify challenges of designing coarse-grained customization models, including issues of functionality partitioning, presentation, and individual differences. These findings highlight potentially critical design choices, and provide direction for future work.”
“While proponents of adaptive user interfaces tout potential performance gains, critics argue that adaptation's unpredictability may disorient users, causing more harm than good. We present a study that examines the relative effects of predictability and accuracy on the usability of adaptive UIs. Our results show that increasing predictability and accuracy led to strongly improved satisfaction. Increasing accuracy also resulted in improved performance and higher utilization of the adaptive interface. Contrary to our expectations, improvement in accuracy had a stronger effect on performance, utilization and some satisfaction ratings than the improvement in predictability.”
“Touchpad and touchscreen interaction using multiple fingers is emerging as a valuable form of high-degree-of-freedom input. While bimanual interaction has been extensively studied, touchpad interaction using multiple fingers of the same hand is not yet well understood. We describe two experiments on user perception and control of multi-touch interaction using one and two hands. The first experiment addresses how to maintain perceptual-motor compatibility in multi-touch interaction, while the second measures the separability of control of degrees-of-freedom in the hands and fingers. Results indicate that two-touch interaction using two hands is compatible with control of two points, while twotouch interaction using one hand is compatible with control of a position, orientation, and hand-span. A slight advantage is found for two hands in separating the control of two positions.”
“We present data from detailed observations of CityWall, a large multi-touch display installed in a central location in Helsinki, Finland. During eight days of installation, 1199 persons interacted with the system in various social configurations. Videos of these encounters were examined qualitatively as well as quantitatively based on human coding of events. The data convey phenomena that arise uniquely in public use: crowding, massively parallel interaction, teamwork, games, negotiations of transitions and handovers, conflict management, gestures and overt remarks to co-present people, and "marking" the display for others. We analyze how public availability is achieved through social learning and negotiation, why interaction becomes performative and, finally, how the display restructures the public space. The multi-touch feature, gesture-based interaction, and the physical display size contributed differentially to these uses. Our findings on the social organization of the use of public displays can be useful for designing such systems for urban environments.”
“Stane is a hand-held interaction device controlled by tactile input: scratching or rubbing textured surfaces and tapping. The system has a range of sensors, including contact microphones, capacitive sensing and inertial sensing, and provides audio and vibrotactile feedback. The surface textures vary around the device, providing perceivably different textures to the user. We demonstrate that the vibration signals generated by stroking and scratching these surfaces can be reliably classified, and can be used as a very cheaply manufacturable way to control different aspects of interaction. The system is demonstrated as a control for a music player.”
“We designed an activity-based prototyping process realized in the ActivityDesigner system that combines the theoretical framework of Activity-Centered Design with traditional iterative design. This process allows designers to leverage human activities as first class objects for design and is supported in ActivityDesigner by three novel features. First, this tool allows designers to model activities based on concrete scenarios collected from everyday lives. The models form a context for design and computational constructs for creating functional prototypes. Second, it allows designers to prototype interaction behaviors based on activity streams spanning time. Third, it allows designers to easily test these prototypes with real users continuously, in situ. We have garnered positive feedback from a series of laboratory user studies and several case studies in which ActivityDesigner was used in realistic design situations. ActivityDesigner was able to effectively streamline a ubicomp design process, and it allowed creating realistic ubicomp application prototypes at a low cost and testing them in everyday lives over an extended period.”
“As research over the last several decades has shown that non-verbal actions such as face and head movement play a crucial role in human interaction, such resources are also likely to play an important role in human-robot interaction. In developing a robotic system that employs embodied resources such as face and head movement, we cannot simply program the robot to move at random but rather we need to consider the ways these actions may be timed to specific points in the talk. This paper discusses our work in developing a museum guide robot that moves its head at interactionally significant points during its explanation of an exhibit. In order to proceed, we first examined the coordination of verbal and non-verbal actions in human guide-visitor interaction. Based on this analysis, we developed a robot that moves its head at interactionally significant points in its talk. We then conducted several experiments to examine human participant non-verbal responses to the robot's head and gaze turns. Our results show that participants are likely to display non-verbal actions, and do so with precision timing, when the robot turns its head and gaze at interactionally significant points than when the robot turns its head at not interactionally significant points. Based on these findings, we propose several suggestions for the design of a guide robot.”
“Designing UIs that run across multiple devices is increasingly important. To address this, we have created a prototyping tool called Damask, which targets web UIs that run on PCs and mobile phones, and prompt-and-response style voice UIs. In Damask, designers sketch out their design for one device while using design patterns to specify higher-level concepts within their design. Damask's patterns include pre-built UI fragments that are already optimized for each device. Designers also use layers to specify which UI parts are common across devices and which are specific to one device. Damask uses the sketches and patterns to generate designs for the other devices, which the designers can refine. A study performed with 12 professional UI designers found that, in the early stages, designers using patterns and layers in Damask created cross-device UIs that are rated at least as good as those created without patterns and layers, without more time.”
“In recent years, the software engineering community has begun to study program navigation and tools to support it. Some of these navigation tools are very useful, but they lack a theoretical basis that could reduce the need for ad hoc tool building approaches by explaining what is fundamentally necessary in such tools. In this paper, we present PFIS (Programmer Flow by Information Scent), a model and algorithm of programmer navigation during software maintenance. We also describe an experimental study of expert programmers debugging real bugs described in real bug reports for a real Java application. We found that PFIS' performance was close to aggregated human decisions as to where to navigate, and was significantly better than individual programmers' decisions.”
“Interaction and navigation in large geometric spaces typically require a sequence of pan and zoom actions. This strategy is often ineffective and cumbersome, especially when trying to study several distant objects. We propose a new distortion technique that folds the intervening space to guarantee visibility of multiple focus regions. The folds themselves show contextual information and support unfolding and paging interactions. Compared to previous work, our method provides more context and distance awareness. We conducted a study comparing the space-folding technique to existing approaches, and found that participants performed significantly better with the new technique.”
“Focus + context techniques such as fisheye lenses are used to navigate and manipulate objects in multi-scale worlds. They provide in-place magnification of a region without requiring users to zoom the whole representation and consequently lose context. Their adoption is however hindered by usability problems mostly due to the nature of the transition between focus and context. Existing transitions are often based on a physical metaphor (magnifying glass, fisheye, rubber sheet), and are almost always achieved through a single dimension: space. We investigate how other dimensions, namely time and translucence, can be used to achieve more efficient transitions. We present an extension to Carpendale's framework for unifying presentation space accommodating these new dimensions. We define new lenses in that space, called Sigma lenses, and compare them to existing lenses through experiments based on a generic task: focus targeting. Results show that one new lens, the Speed-coupled flattening lens, significantly outperforms all others.”
“Faceted browsing is a promising way to incrementally refine data sets. Current approaches do not scale well in terms of screen size and have shortcomings in interacting with hierarchical facets. This paper introduces FacetZoom, a novel multi-scale widget combining facet browsing with zoomable user interfaces. Hierarchical facets are displayed as space-filling widgets which allow a fast traversal across all levels while simultaneously maintaining context. We contribute both a seamless continuous navigation and a quick tap-and-center interaction. Two prototypes are described which successfully apply the space-structuring widget to continuous, sampled data and an information collection. A formative user study of the latter indicates that the interface scales well to small screens. FacetZoom is versatile and offers consistent searching and browsing behaviors in a multitude of applications and device settings.”
“The interoperability of disparate data types and sources has been a long standing problem and a hindering factor for the efficacy and efficiency in visual exploration applications. In this paper, we present a solution, called LivOlay, that enables the rapid visual overlay of live data rendered in different applications. Our tool addresses datasets in which visual registration of the information is necessary in order to allow for thorough understanding and visual analysis. We also discuss initial evaluation and user feedback of LivOlay.”
“We describe a new type of graphical user interface widget called the "PieCursor." The PieCursor is based on the Tracking Menu technique and consists of a radial cluster of command wedges, is roughly the size of a cursor, and replaces the traditional cursor. The PieCursor technique merges the normal cursor function of pointing with command selection into a single action. A controlled experiment was conducted to compare the performance of rapid command and target selection using the PieCursor against larger versions of Tracking Menus and a status quo Toolbar configuration. Results indicate that for small clusters of tools (4 and 8 command wedges) the PieCursor can outperform the toolbar by 20.8% for coarse pointing. For fine pointing, the performance of the PieCursor degrades approximately to the performance found for the Toolbar condition.”
“We present a new technique called 'Tilt Menu' for better extending selection capabilities of pen-based interfaces. The Tilt Menu is implemented by using 3D orientation information of pen devices while performing selection tasks. The Tilt Menu has the potential to aid traditional one-handed techniques as it simultaneously generates the secondary input (e.g., a command or parameter selection) while drawing/interacting with a pen tip without having to use the second hand or another device. We conduct two experiments to explore the performance of the Tilt Menu. In the first experiment, we analyze the effect of parameters of the Tilt Menu, such as the menu size and orientation of the item, on its usability. Results of the first experiment suggest some design guidelines for the Tilt Menu. In the second experiment, the Tilt Menu is compared to two types of techniques while performing connect-the-dot tasks using freeform drawing mechanism. Results of the second experiment show that the Tilt Menu perform better in comparison to the Tool Palette, and is as good as the Toolglass.”
“Selecting items in cascading pull-down menus is a frequent task in most GUIs. These selections involve two major components: steering and selection, with the steering component being the most time-consuming and error-prone. We describe a new technique, called Adaptive Activation-Area Menu (AAMU) that eliminate corner steering. AAMUs contain an enlarged activation area which dynamically resizes itself providing a broader steering path for menu navigation. We also combined AAMUs with Force-field menus, to create Force-AAMUs. We empirically demonstrate that AAMUs and Force-AAMUs outperformed the current default menu. We also compared performances of various other menus including Enlarged activation area menus (EMUs) and Gesture based selection with mouse as an input device. Overall, users show higher satisfaction rates for AAMUs over other menu designs.”
“Hierarchical menus are now ubiquitous. The performance of the menu depends on many factors: structure, layout, colors and so on. There has been extensive research on novel menus, but there has been little work on improving the performance by optimizing the menu's structure. This paper proposes an algorithm based on the genetic algorithm (GA) for optimizing the performance of menus. The algorithm aims to minimize the average selection time of menu items by considering movement and decision time. We show results on a static hierarchical menu of a cellular phone where a small screen and limited input device are assumed. Our work makes several contributions: a novel mathematical optimization model for hierarchical menus; novel optimization method based on the genetic algorithm (GA).”
“Many mobile phones integrate services such as personal calendars. Given the social nature of the stored data, however, users often need to access such information as part of a phone conversation. In typical non-headset use, this re-quires users to interrupt their conversations to look at the screen. We investigate a counter-intuitive solution: to avoid the need for interruption we replace the visual interface with one based on auditory feedback. Surprisingly, this can be done without interfering with the phone conversation. We present blindSight, a prototype application that replaces the traditionally visual in-call menu of a mobile phone. Users interact using the phone keypad, without looking at the screen. BlindSight responds with auditory feedback. This feedback is heard only by the user, not by the person on the other end of the line. We present the results of two user studies of our prototype. The first study verifies that useful keypress accuracy can be obtained for the phone-at-ear position. The second study compares the blindSight system against a visual baseline condition and finds a preference for blindSight.”
“Supporting one-handed thumb operation of touchscreen-based mobile devices presents a challenging tradeoff between visual expressivity and ease of interaction. ThumbSpace and Shift -- two new application-independent, software-based interaction techniques -- address this tradeoff in significantly different ways. ThumbSpace addresses distant objects while Shift addresses small object occlusion. We present two extensive, comparative user studies. The first compares ThumbSpace and Shift to peripheral hardware (directional pad and scrollwheel) and direct touchscreen input for selecting objects while standing and walking. The data favored the Shift design overall, but suggested ThumbSpace is promising for distant objects. Our second study examines the benefits and learnability of combining Shift and ThumbSpace on a device with a larger screen (3.5"). We found their combined use offered users better overall speed and accuracy in hitting small targets (3.6 mm{sup:2}) than using either method alone.”
“When camera phones are used as magic lenses in handheld augmented reality applications involving wall maps or posters, pointing can be divided into two phases: (1) an initial coarse physical pointing phase, in which the target can be directly observed on the background surface, and (2) a fine-control virtual pointing phase, in which the target can only be observed through the device display. In two studies, we show that performance cannot be adequately modeled with standard Fitts' law, but can be adequately modeled with a two-component modification. We chart the performance space and analyze users' target acquisition strategies in varying conditions. Moreover, we show that the standard Fitts' law model does hold for dynamic peephole pointing where there is no guiding background surface and hence the physical pointing component of the extended model is not needed. Finally, implications for the design of magic lens interfaces are considered.”
“We present the see-Puck, a round display module that extends an open robot platform, the e-Puck. It holds 148 LEDs (light emitting diodes) to enable the presentation of eye-catching visual animated patterns, while keeping hardware costs and energy consumption at a minimum. The see-Puck was a result of a study of future robot applications, where relationship and interaction qualities found in owners of unusual pets (e.g. spiders, snakes, and lizards) were transferred to the robotic domain. In our first proof-of-concept application, humans and robots can engage in a playful open ended interaction. We argue that open interactive robot platforms such as the see-Puck point to opportunities not only in robotics but also future user interfaces and ubiquitous computing.”
“This paper presents a new study of the role, importance and meaning of sound in the home. Drawing on interview data and sound recordings gathered from seven households, this study offers fresh insight into the ways in which the domestic soundscape is managed and understood. The data revealed that household members engaged in a wide variety of sound management practices to monitor and control the real-time flow of sonic information throughout the home. They also showed that families were sometimes surprised and delighted by the ability to record fragments of the soundscape for later use. These findings suggest a number of roles for technology in enhancing the domestic soundscape and its associated behaviors, which we present here in the form of example sonic interventions created in a design workshop at the end of the project.”
“Threshold devices present information gathered from the home's surroundings to give new views on the domestic situation. We built two prototypes of different threshold devices and studied them in field trials with participant households. The Local Barometer displays online text and images related to the home's locality depending on the local wind conditions to give an impression of the sociocultural surroundings. The Plane Tracker tracks aircraft passing overhead and imagines their flights onscreen to resource an understanding of the home's global links. Our studies indicated that the experiences they provided were compelling, that participants could and did interpret the devices in various ways, that their form designs were appropriate for domestic environments, that using ready-made information contributed to the richness of the experiences, and that situating the information they provided with respect to the home and its locality was important for the ways people engaged with them.”
“The focus of this work is the requirements engineering process in the home care domain. The overall aim is to design and document a flexible methodology to facilitate the elicitation of complex, dynamic, multi-stakeholder requirements and needs. This paper details the complexity and uniqueness of the home care domain and outlines the features of home care that demand a new or tailored approach to requirements engineering. It concludes by presenting a consolidated list of features that must be available or supported in requirements engineering methods in the home care domain.”
“This paper presents the design and evaluation of "Game Over!", which is the world's first universally inaccessible game (i.e., a game that can be played by no one). The game is meant to be used as an educational tool for disseminating and teaching game accessibility guidelines. This is achieved by providing game developers a first-hand (frustrating) experience of how it feels interacting with a game that is not accessible, due to the fact that important design rules were not considered or applied during its design. Both the overall concept and the approach followed were evaluated and validated through: (a) an on-line survey; (b) "live" feedback from players and developers; and (c) public opinions and critique collected from numerous Web sites and blogs where "Game Over!" was presented and discussed. The evaluation outcomes strongly suggest that computer games and humor constitute a perfect match for reaching out, motivating and educating the game developers' community in the subject of game accessibility.”
“This paper reports the experimental studies we have performed to evaluate Explore!, an m-learning system that supports middle school students during a visit to an archaeological park. It exploits a learning technique called excursion-game, whose aim is to help students to acquire historical notions while playing and to make archaeological visits more effective and exciting. In order to understand the potentials and limitations of Explore!, our studies compare the experience of playing the excursion-game with and without technological support. The design and evaluation of Explore! have provided knowledge on the advantages and pitfalls of m-learning that may be instrumental in informing the current debate on e-learning.”
“Most video games require constant interaction, so game designers must pay careful attention to usability issues. However, there are few formal methods for evaluating the usability of game interfaces. In this paper, we introduce a new set of heuristics that can be used to carry out usability inspections of video games. The heuristics were developed to help identify usability problems in both early and functional game prototypes. We developed the heuristics by analyzing PC game reviews from a popular gaming website, and the review set covered 108 different games and included 18 from each of 6 major game genres. We analyzed the reviews and identified twelve common classes of usability problems seen in games. We developed ten usability heuristics based on the problem categories, and they describe how common game usability problems can be avoided. A preliminary evaluation of the heuristics suggests that they help identify game-specific usability problems that can easily be overlooked otherwise.”
“Today's handheld gaming systems allow players to engage in multiplayer games via ad-hoc, wireless networking. They are also now sufficiently commonplace that it is possible to study how portability and ad-hoc wireless networking have affected the social gaming practices of owners of these systems. In this paper, we report findings from a qualitative study investigating the collocated multiplayer gaming practices of Nintendo DS owners. Based on interviews of nine DS owners and observations of three organized gaming events, we identified three major themes surrounding the social, multiplayer gaming practices of Nintendo DS users: renegade gaming, or the notion that users reappropriate contexts traditionally hostile to game play; pragmatic and social barriers to the formation of ad-hoc pick-up games, despite a clear desire for multiplayer, collocated gaming; and private gaming spheres, or the observation that the handheld device's form factor creates individual, privatized gaming contexts within larger social contexts. These findings lead to a set of implications for the design of future handheld gaming systems.”
“We introduce the Expandable Grid, a novel interaction technique for creating, editing, and viewing many types of security policies. Security policies, such as file permissions policies, have traditionally been displayed and edited in user interfaces based on a list of rules, each of which can only be viewed or edited in isolation. These list-of-rules interfaces cause problems for users when multiple rules interact, because the interfaces have no means of conveying the interactions amongst rules to users. Instead, users are left to figure out these rule interactions themselves. An Expandable Grid is an interactive matrix visualization designed to address the problems that list-of-rules interfaces have in conveying policies to users. This paper describes the Expandable Grid concept, shows a system using an Expandable Grid for setting file permissions in the Microsoft Windows XP operating system, and gives results of a user study involving 36 participants in which the Expandable Grid approach vastly outperformed the native Windows XP file-permissions interface on a broad range of policy-authoring tasks.”
“We present LiveRAC, a visualization system that supports the analysis of large collections of system management time-series data consisting of hundreds of parameters across thousands of network devices. LiveRAC provides high information density using a reorderable matrix of charts, with semantic zooming adapting each chart's visual representation to the available space. LiveRAC allows side-by-side visual comparison of arbitrary groupings of devices and parameters at multiple levels of detail. A staged design and development process culminated in the deployment of LiveRAC in a production environment. We conducted an informal longitudinal evaluation of LiveRAC to better understand which proposed visualization techniques were most useful in the target environment.”
“There is a lack of widely-accepted metrics for evaluating analysts' experiences with interactive visualizations (IV) for information analysis. We report an approach for developing analyst-centered IV metrics that is built upon understanding the workplace needs and experiences of information analysts with respect to IVs. We derive metrics from human-computer interaction heuristics, specializing the metrics to address the characteristics of IVs and analysts. When there are no existing heuristics, analysts' needs and experiences inform new heuristics.”
“In a typical speech dictation interface, the recognizer's best-guess is displayed as normal, unannotated text. This ignores potentially useful information about the recognizer's confidence in its recognition hypothesis. Using a confidence measure (which itself may sometimes be inaccurate), we investigated providing visual feedback about low-confidence portions of the recognition using shaded, red underlining. An evaluation showed, compared to a baseline without underlining, underlining low-confidence areas did not increase user's speed or accuracy in detecting errors. However, we found that when recognition errors were correctly underlined, they were discovered significantly more often than baseline. Conversely, when errors failed to be underlined, they were discovered less often. Our results indicate confidence visualization can be effective -- but only if the confidence measure has high accuracy. Further, since our results show that users tend to trust confidence visualization, designers should be careful in its application if a high accuracy confidence measure is not available.”
“A persona represents a group of target users that share common behavioral characteristics. By using a narrative, picture, and name, a persona provides HCI practitioners with a vivid and specific design target. This research develops a new methodology for the identification and creation of personas through the application of Latent Semantic Analysis (LSA). An application of the LSA methodology is provided in the context of the design of an Institutional Repository system. The LSA methodology helps overcome some of the drawbacks of current methods for the identification and creation of personas, and makes the process less subjective, more efficient, and less reliant on specialized skills.”
“Recent years have seen a growing interest in the role that narrative can play in learning. With the emergence of narrative-centered learning environments that engage students by drawing them into rich interactions with compelling characters, we have begun to see the significant potential offered by immersive story-based learning experiences. In this paper we describe two studies that investigate the impact of empathetic characters on student perceptions of presence. A study was initially conducted with middle school students, and was then replicated with high school students. The results indicate that, for both populations, employing empathetic characters in narrative-centered learning environments significantly increases student perceptions of presence. The studies also reveal that empathetic characters contribute to a heightened sense of student involvement and control in learning situations.”
“Much has been written on creating personas -- both what they are good for, and how to create them. A common problem with personas is that they are not based on real customer data, and if they are, the data set is not of a sample size that can be considered statistically significant. In this paper, we describe a new method for creating and validating personas, based on the statistical analysis of data, which is fast and cost effective.”
“In this paper, we introduce a prototype system designed to support mobile group socializing that has been appropriated for everyday use by 150 users over 18 months. The system supports cross-channel communication, allowing users to participate in group conversations using text messaging, instant messaging, email and the web. It does this with the "console," a uniform text-based syntax that enables the prototype to be used over a variety of mediums. We found that participants used the system mostly for ad-hoc coordination rather than chat, with pervasive, cross-channel group communication supporting an informal "half-invite" style of invitation. We examine why coordination dominates over chat, suggesting that cross-channel mobile group messaging serves a distinct role, different to traditional text messaging, instant messaging and email. Furthermore, we found differences in the content and usage habits across channels, for example messages sent from a computer were more likely to refer to time and location than those sent using a phone. We also discuss the usage of the prototype and compare it to other work.”
“In this paper, we describe research exploring the effect of behavioral and visual realism of avatars on users' social copresence in emotionally engaged conversations conducted via a simulated mobile video telephone. We offer an elaborated definition of Social Copresence to better measure users' engagement with conversational partners in social interactions that do not involve specific tasks or concrete outcomes. We investigate ways to secure mobile telephone users' anonymity while preserving their most important nonverbal affective behaviors. Experimental results with 180 participants using different combinations of static and dynamic, high and low iconic (both video and graphically animated) avatars show increased Social Copresence with dynamic high-iconic (similar to the human communicator) avatars incorporating correct facial expressions, even when these are presented on the small screen of mobile telephones in such a way that individual identities are masked. The results point to an economical combination of behavioral and iconic realism of avatars that produces maximum emotional engagement in anonymous social interactions using mobile video telephones.”
“Social networking sites support a variety of shared content types such as photos, videos, or music. More structured or form-based social content types are not mainstream but we have started seeing sites evolve that support them. This paper describes the design and use of structured lists in an enterprise social networking system. As a major feature of our shared lists, we introduced the ability to reuse someone else's list. We report the results on the use and reuse of shared lists based on three months of usage data from 285 users and interviews with 9 users. Our findings suggest that despite the structured nature of lists, our users socialize more around lists than photos, and use lists as a medium for self-representation.”
“Previous research shows that video viewing (a frequent activity in language courses) is more effective when students receive guidance. We investigate how to support students in an on-line environment in acquiring cultural knowledge and intercultural competence by viewing clips from feature films from the target culture. To test the effectiveness of a set of attention-focusing techniques (pause-predict-ponder), some of which have been shown to be effective in other contexts, we created ICCAT, a simple tutor that enhances an existing classroom model for the development of intercultural competence. We ran a study in two French Online classrooms with 35 participants, comparing ICCAT versions with and without attention-focusing techniques. We found that the addition of the pause-predict-ponder seemed to guide students in acquiring cultural knowledge and significantly increased students' ability to reason from an intercultural perspective. We discuss possible implications for intelligent tutoring systems in such difficult and ill-defined domains.”
“A prototype of friction-based horizontally rotating fingertip stimulator was used to investigate emotional experiences and behavioral responses to haptic stimulation. The rotation style of 12 different stimuli was varied by burst length (i.e., 20, 50, 100 ms), continuity (i.e., continuous and discontinuous), and direction (e.g., forward and backward). Using these stimuli 528 stimulus pairs were presented to 12 subjects who were to distinguish if stimuli in each pair were the same or different. Then they rated the stimuli using four scales measuring the pleasantness, arousal, approachability, and dominance qualities of the 12 stimuli. The results showed that continuous forward-backward rotating stimuli were rated as significantly more unpleasant, arousing, avoidable, and dominating than other types of stimulations (e.g., discontinuous forward rotation). The reaction times to these stimuli were significantly faster than reaction times to discontinuous forward and backward rotating stimuli. The results clearly suggest that even simple haptic stimulation can carry emotional information. The results can be utilized when making use of haptics in human-technology interaction.”
“We present a pair of experiments that explore the effects of tactile-feedback and direct vs. indirect pen input on pointing and crossing selection tasks. While previous work has demonstrated the validity of crossing as a useful selection mechanism for pen-based computing, those experiments were conducted using an indirect input device -- one in which the pen-input and display were separated. We investigate users' performance with pointing and crossing interfaces controlled via not only an indirect input device, but also a direct input device -- one in which the pen-input and display are co-located. Results show that direct input significantly outperforms indirect input for crossing selection, but the two modalities are essentially equivalent in pointing selection. A small amount of tactile feedback is shown to be beneficial for both pointing and crossing selection, most noticeably in crossing tasks when using direct input where visual feedback is often occluded by a hand or stylus.”
“This paper presents a study of finger-based text entry for mobile devices with touchscreens. Many devices are now coming to market that have no physical keyboards (the Apple iPhone being a very popular example). Touchscreen keyboards lack any tactile feedback and this may cause problems for entering text and phone numbers. We ran an experiment to compare devices with a physical keyboard, a standard touchscreen and a touchscreen with tactile feedback added. We tested this in both static and mobile environments. The results showed that the addition of tactile feedback to the touchscreen significantly improved finger-based text entry, bringing it close to the performance of a real physical keyboard. A second experiment showed that higher specification tactile actuators could improve performance even further. The results suggest that manufacturers should use tactile feedback in their touchscreen devices to regain some of the feeling lost when interacting on a touchscreen with a finger.”
“So called intractable conflicts may benefit from more modest and socially oriented approaches than those based on classical conflict resolution techniques. This paper is inspired by theories on small group intervention in a conflict. The general claim is that participants may achieve a greater understanding of and appreciation for the other's viewpoint under conditions that support partaking in a tangible joint task and creating a shared narration. Our goal was to design a methodology wherein the extent to which technology contributes to conflict negotiation and resolution could be assessed. Specifically, a co-located interface for producing a joint narration as a tool for favouring reconciliation is presented and discussed. The results of an initial set of studies where the interface was used by Arab and Jewish youth in Israel provided insight into the usability of the various components of the technology and of the paradigm.”
“When exploring a topic as intangible as the construction of mobile social networks it is necessary to look at how relationships are formed and at the way users identify themselves through their interactions. The theoretically informed discourses within cultural theory make an ideal lens for understanding these subtle nuances of use in terms of design. This paper describes a case study where the application of abstract cultural theory concepts to the practical act of analysing qualitative data from a user study resulted in the development of The Swarm mobile phone prototypes. By signposting the intersection of cultural theory within HCI, the value of a philosophically grounded mobile phone design space is highlighted. To uncover reactions to the design we explored the blogs that sprung up critiquing an online version of The Swarm and in doing so, discovered the at times subversive values (such as the need to lie) that users place on their mobile mediated interactions.”
“History repeatedly demonstrates that rural communities have unique technological needs. Yet, we know little about how rural communities use modern technologies, so we lack knowledge on how to design for them. To address this gap, our empirical paper investigates behavioral differences between more than 3,000 rural and urban social media users. Using a dataset collected from a broadly popular social network site, we analyze users' profiles, 340,000 online friendships and 200,000 interpersonal messages. Using social capital theory, we predict differences between rural and urban users and find strong evidence supporting our hypotheses. Namely, rural people articulate far fewer friends online, and those friends live much closer to home. Our results also indicate that the groups have substantially different gender distributions and use privacy features differently. We conclude by discussing design implications drawn from our findings; most importantly, designers should reconsider the binary friend-or-not model to allow for incremental trust-building.”
“For decades, Fitts' law (1954) has been used to model pointing time in user interfaces. As with any rapid motor act, faster pointing movements result in increased errors. But although prior work has examined accuracy as the "spread of hits," no work has formulated a predictive model for error rates (0-100%) based on Fitts' law parameters. We show that Fitts' law mathematically implies a predictive error rate model, which we derive. We then describe an experiment in which target size, target distance, and movement time are manipulated. Our results show a strong model fit: a regression analysis of observed vs. predicted error rates yields a correlation of R{sup:2}=.959 for N=90 points. Furthermore, we show that the effect on error rate of target size (W) is greater than that of target distance (A), indicating a departure from Fitts' law, which maintains that W and A contribute proportionally to index of difficulty (ID). Our error model can be used with Fitts' law to estimate and predict error rates along with speeds, providing a framework for unifying this dichotomy.”
“We present an empirical analysis of crossing-based dialog boxes. First, we study the spatial constraints required for efficient crossing-based interactions in the case of a simple multi-parameter dialog box. Through a series of 3 tasks, we establish the minimal value of the landing margin, the takeoff margin, and the column width. We also offer an estimation of the role of stroke shape on user performance. After studying the reasons for errors during our experiment, we propose a relaxed crossing semantic that combines aspects of pointing and crossing-based interfaces. To test our design, we compare a naïve dialog box implementation with our new implementation, as well as a standard point-and-click dialog box. Our results reveal that there is not a significant difference between the naïve crossing implementation and the standard point-and-click interface and that the new crossing semantic is faster than both the naïve crossing implementation and the point-and-click interface, despite a higher error rate. Together these two experiments establish that crossing-based dialog boxes can be as spatially efficient and faster than their point-and-click counterpart. Our new semantic provides the first step towards a smooth transition from point-and-click interfaces to crossing-based interfaces.”
“The broadening array of technologies available to support the design of classroom activity has the potential to reshape science learning in schools. This paper presents a ubiquitous computing application, WallCology, which situates a virtual ecosystem within the unseen space of classroom walls, presenting affordances for science learners to engage in investigations of ecological phenomena. Motivated by a desire to foster authenticity in classroom science inquiry, WallCology extends the "embedded phenomena" framework in three ways: by enabling collaborative investigations among distributed work teams, by increasing the physicality of investigation activities, and by expanding the loci of activity sites. Pilot studies in two urban classrooms provide qualified support for the effectiveness of WallCology in promoting more authentic inquiry practices, content learning, and attitudes regarding scientific investigations.”
“We describe an experiment to test the hypothesis that Fitts' throughput is independent of the speed-accuracy tradeoff. Eighteen participants used a mouse in performing a total of 5,400 target selection trials. Comparing nominal, speed-emphasis, and accuracy-emphasis conditions, significant main effects were found on movement time (ms) and error rate (%), but not on throughput (bits/s). In the latter case, failure to reject the null hypothesis of "no significant difference" (i.e., .05 < p < 1) is viewed as evidence supporting the constant-throughput hypothesis.”
“We study the development of common ground in an emergency management planning task. Twelve three-person multi-role teams performed the task with a paper prototype in a controlled setting; each team completed three versions of the task. We use converging measures to document the development of common ground in the teams and present an in-depth analysis of the characteristics of the common ground development process. Our findings indicate that in complex collaborative work, process common ground increases, thus diminishing the need for acts like information querying or strategy discussions about how to organize the collaborative activities. However, content common ground is created and tested throughout the three runs; in fact dialogue acts used to clarify this content increase over time. Discussion of the implications of these findings for the theory of common ground and the design of collaborative systems follows.”
“Web search is often viewed as a solitary task; however, there are many situations in which groups of people gather around a single computer to jointly search for information online. We present the findings of interviews with teachers, librarians, and developing world researchers that provide details about users' collaborative search habits in shared-computer settings, revealing several limitations of this practice. We then introduce CoSearch, a system we developed to improve the experience of co-located collaborative Web search by leveraging readily available devices such as mobile phones and extra mice. Finally, we present an evaluation comparing CoSearch to status quo collaboration approaches, and show that CoSearch enabled distributed control and division of labor, thus reducing the frustrations associated with shared-computer searches, while still preserving the positive aspects of communication and collaboration associated with joint computer use.”
“Today's Web browsers provide limited support for rich information-seeking and information-sharing scenarios. A survey we conducted of 204 knowledge workers at a large technology company has revealed that a large proportion of users engage in searches that include collaborative activities. We present the results of the survey, and then review the implications of these findings for designing new Web search interfaces that provide tools for sharing.”
“The initiation of interaction in face-to-face environments is a gradual process, and takes place in a rich information landscape of awareness, attention, and social signals. One of the main benefits of this process is that people can be more sensitive to issues of privacy and interruption while they are moving towards interaction. However, on-line communication tools do not provide this subtlety, and often lead to unwanted interruptions. We have developed a prototype message system called OpenMessenger (OM) that adds the idea of gradual initiation of interaction to on-line communication. OpenMessenger provides multiple levels of awareness about people, and provides notification to those about whom information is being gathered. OpenMessenger allows people to negotiate interaction in a richer fashion than is possible with any other current messaging system. Preliminary evaluation data suggest the utility of the approach, but also shows that there are a number of issues yet to be resolved in this area.”
“Driving requires focused attention and timely decision making for appropriate maneuvers. This relies on well-timed and accurate information. Designing an in-vehicle information system it is important to ensure that the information for the driver does not negatively affect cognitive processing and driving performance. This study investigates levels of information accuracy necessary in in-vehicle information systems to elicit positive behavioral and attitudinal responses from the driver. In a 2 (gender) by 5 (accuracy: 100%,”
“Although in-car GPS navigation technology is proliferating, it is not well understood how its use alters the ways people interpret their environment and navigate through it. We argue that GPS-based car navigation might disengage people from their surrounding environment, but also has the potential to open up novel ways to engage with it. We present an ethnographically-informed study with GPS users, showing evidence for practices of disengagement as well as new opportunities for engagement, illustrating our findings using rich descriptions from the field. Grounded in our observations we propose design principles for GPS systems that support richer experiences of driving. We argue that for a fuller understanding of issues of disengagement and engagement with the environment we need to move beyond a focus on the (re)design of GPS devices, and point to future directions of work that embrace a broader perspective.”
“Increasing functionality, growing media volumes and dynamic data in today's in-vehicle information systems bear new challenges for user interaction design. Traditional hierarchical and menu-based interaction can only provide limited support while new search-based approaches are promising. In this work we assess different search techniques and search-based user interfaces. In particular we compare free search across all data items with categorized search. Our experiments with functional prototypes show that free search is more efficient and easier to use than searching within categories. Tests in a driving simulator show promising results regarding safety and workload. Means for alphanumeric input appear to be essential for an efficient and safe search interaction while driving.”
“Multi-flick, which consists of repeated flick actions, has received popular media attention as an intuitive and natural document-scrolling technique for stylus based systems. In this paper we put multi-flick to test, by designing several flick-based scrolling techniques. We first map out the de-sign space of multi-flick and identify mapping functions that make multi-flick a natural and intuitive technique for document navigation. In the first experiment we compare several multi-flick variations for navigating lists on three different devices -- a PDA, a tabletPC, and a large table. Our study shows that compound-multi-flick (CMF) is the most preferred technique and it is at least as fast, if not faster than the traditional scrollbar. In a follow-up experiment, we evaluate multi-flick for scrolling text-based documents. Results show that all implementations of multi-flick are as good as the scrollbar for short distances while CMF is the most preferred. We discuss the implications of our findings and present several design guidelines.”
“Peephole interaction occurs when a spatially aware display is moved and acts as a viewport to reveal different parts of the virtual space that cannot all fit within the display at once. We investigate pointing within this peephole metaphor, where the targets may not be initially visible on the display, but are dynamically revealed by moving the display. We develop and experimentally validate a quantitative model for peephole pointing. Our results indicate that the model accurately accounts for peephole pointing for a variety of display sizes, both with and without users' having prior knowledge of the target location.”
“Isometric and elastic devices are most compatible with a rate control mapping. However, the effect of elastic stiffness has not been thoroughly investigated nor its interaction with control gain. In a controlled experiment, these factors are investigated along with user feedback regarding ease-of-use and fatigue. The results reveal a U-shaped profile of control gain vs. movement time, with different profiles for different stiffness levels. Using the optimum control gain for each stiffness level, performance across stiffness levels were similar. However, users preferred lower stiffness and lower control gain levels due to increased controller displacement. Based on these results, design guidelines for elastic rate control devices are given.”
“Modern enterprises are replete with numerous online processes. Many must be performed frequently and are tedious, while others are done less frequently yet are complex or hard to remember. We present interviews with knowledge workers that reveal a need for mechanisms to automate the execution of and to share knowledge about these processes. In response, we have developed the CoScripter system (formerly Koala [11]), a collaborative scripting environment for recording, automating, and sharing web-based processes. We have deployed CoScripter within a large corporation for more than 10 months. Through usage log analysis and interviews with users, we show that CoScripter has addressed many user automation and sharing needs, to the extent that more than 50 employees have voluntarily incorporated it into their work practice. We also present ways people have used CoScripter and general issues for tools that support automation and sharing of how-to knowledge.”
“Information awareness applications offer the exciting potential to help people to better manage the data they encounter on a routine basis, but customizing these applications is a difficult task. Most applications allow users to perform basic customizations or programmers to create advanced ones. We present an intermediate customization space and Cocoa Buzz, an application that demonstrates one way to bridge these two extremes. Cocoa Buzz runs on an extra display on the user's desktop or on a large shared display and cycles through different information sources customized by the user. We further demonstrate some of the customizations that have been made using this approach. We show some preliminary evidence to suggest that this approach may be useful at providing users with the ability to perform customizations across this spectrum.”
“Pervasive systems provide services that are situated within specific contexts. An everyday example of this is Wi-Fi hotspots. Factors such as branding and presentation are known to affect whether users are prepared to invest trust in services, but little is known about trust in situated services. This paper describes an experiment to measure de facto trust in Wi-Fi hotspots in public places, as opposed to examining trust behaviour in a simulated lab setting. We investigated two hypotheses about the effect of location-specific images in the hotspot's pages on trust behaviours, compared to images of non-specific locations. We found a significant result which confirms that decisions to access an unfamiliar Wi-Fi hotspot can be affected by location-relevant images.”
“We designed and iterated on a photo browsing application for high-end mobile phones. The application, Zurfer, supports viewing of photos from the user, their contacts, and the general user population. Photos are organized using a channel metaphor, driven by multiple dimensions: social, spatial and topical. Zurfer was deployed to over 500 users; extensive user research was conducted with nine participants. The data from the deployment and the study exposes general themes of mobile application use, as well as requirements for mobile applications in the photos domain, mobile social applications, and entertainment-driven mobile applications.”
“PhotoSpread is a spreadsheet system for organizing and analyzing photo collections. It extends the current spreadsheet paradigm in two ways: (a) PhotoSpread accommodates sets of objects (e.g., photos) annotated with tags (attribute-value pairs). Formulas can manipulate object sets and refer to tags. (b) Photos can be reorganized (tags and location changed) by drag-and-drop operations on the spreadsheet. The PhotoSpread design was driven by the needs of field biologists who have large collections of annotated photos. The paper describes the PhotoSpread functionality and the design choices made.”
“Picbreeder is an online service that allows users to collaboratively evolve images. Like in other Interactive Evolutionary Computation (IEC) programs, users evolve images on Picbreeder by selecting ones that appeal to them to produce a new generation. However, Picbreeder also offers an online community in which to share these images, and most importantly, the ability to continue evolving others' images. Through this process of branching from other images, and through continually increasing image complexity made possible by the NeuroEvolution of Augmenting Topologies (NEAT) algorithm, evolved images proliferate unlike in any other current IEC systems. Participation requires no explicit talent from the users, thereby opening Picbreeder to the entire Internet community. This paper details how Picbreeder encourages innovation, featuring images that were collaboratively evolved.”
“Motion constraints providing guidance for 3D navigation have recently been suggested as a way of offloading some of the cognitive effort of traversing complex 3D environments on a computer. We present findings from an evaluation of the benefits of this practice where users achieved significantly better results in memory recall and performance when given access to such a guidance method. The study was conducted on both standard desktop computers with mouse and keyboard, as well as on an immersive CAVE system. Interestingly, our results also show that the improvements were more dramatic for desktop users than for CAVE users, even outperforming the latter. Furthermore, the study indicates that allowing the users to retain local control over the navigation on the desktop platform helps them in familiarizing themselves with the 3D world.”
“Existing e-book readers do not do a good job supporting many reading tasks that people perform, as ethnographers report that when reading, people frequently read from multiple display surfaces. In this paper we present our design of a dual display e-book reader and explore how it can be used to interact with electronic documents. Our design supports embodied interactions like folding, flipping, and fanning for local/lightweight navigation. We also show how mechanisms like Space Filling Thumbnails can use the increased display space to aid global navigation. Lastly, the detachable faces in our design can facilitate inter-document operations and flexible layout of documents in the workspace. Semi-directed interviews with seven users found that dual-displays have the potential to improve the reading experience by supporting several local navigation tasks better than a single display device. Users also identified many reading tasks for which the device would be valuable. Users did not find the embodied interface particularly useful when reading in our controlled lab setting, however.”
“Traditional interfaces for information access do not fully support queries that rely on semantic relationships between terms. To better support such queries, we introduce a system that automatically extracts subject-verb-object concepts from unstructured text documents and dynamically presents them to the user as navigable refinements. This approach, which we call "idea navigation," makes subject-verb-object querying as simple as selecting successive refinements. It also supports exploratory search by providing a view of the most common ideas in the current result set. First-time users of a prototype system successfully used idea navigation to solve realistic search tasks, demonstrating its effectiveness.”
“The growing amount of available information poses challenges not only in the process of information retrieval. The usability of the rendered search process and results can be increased by appropriate visualization techniques or new interaction paradigms, or both. In this article we present the HoneyComb paradigm, an information visualization style that aims to render and manage large quantities of information items. We describe the design objectives and the prototype of HC. Finally, we present a short evaluation of the HC paradigm in the context of search and browsing.”
“Recent advances in small inexpensive sensors, low-power processing, and activity modeling have enabled applications that use on-body sensing and machine learning to infer people's activities throughout everyday life. To address the growing rate of sedentary lifestyles, we have developed a system, UbiFit Garden, which uses these technologies and a personal, mobile display to encourage physical activity. We conducted a 3-week field trial in which 12 participants used the system and report findings focusing on their experiences with the sensing and activity inference. We discuss key implications for systems that use on-body sensing and activity inference to encourage physical activity.”
“Today the design of most healthcare technology is driven by the considerations of healthcare professionals and technology companies. This has several benefits, but we argue that there is a need for a supplementary design approach on the basis the citizen and his or her everyday life. An approach where the main focus is to develop healthcare technology that fits the routines of daily life and thus allows the citizens to continue with the activities they like and have grown used to -- also with an aging body or when managing a chronic condition. Thus, with this approach it is not just a matter of fixing a health condition, more importantly is the matter of sustaining everyday life as a whole. This argument is a result from our work -- using participatory design methods -- on the development of supportive healthcare technology for elderly people and for diabetic, pregnant women.”
“Repetitive strain injuries and ergonomics concerns have become increasingly significant health issues as a growing number of individuals frequently use computers for long periods of time. Currently, limited software mechanisms exist for managing ergonomics; the most well-known are "break-reminder" packages that schedule and recommend typing breaks. Yet despite the proven benefits of taking breaks, such packages are rarely adopted due to the over-head of introducing periodic interruptions into a user's workflow. In this paper, we describe SuperBreak, a break-reminder package that provides hands-free interactions during breaks, with the goal of encouraging users to take more breaks and enhancing the benefits of those breaks. In a field study of 26 knowledge workers, 85% preferred SuperBreak over a traditional break-reminder system, and on average participants took a higher percentage of the interactive breaks suggested to them. Our results highlight the value of interactivity for improving the adoption and retention of ergonomic break practices.”
“A number of recent scams and security attacks (phishing, spyware, fake terminals, ...) hinge on a crook's ability to observe user behavior. In this paper, we describe the design, implementation, and evaluation of a novel class of user authentication systems that are resilient to observation attacks. Our proposal is the first to rely on the human ability to simultaneously process multiple sensory inputs to authenticate, and is resilient to most observation attacks. We build a prototype based on user feedback gained through low fidelity tests. We conduct a within-subjects usability study of the prototype with 38 participants, which we complement with a security analysis. Our results show that users can authenticate within times comparable to that of graphical password schemes, with relatively low error rates, while being considerably better protected against observation attacks. Our design and evaluation process allows us to outline design principles for observation-resilient authentication systems.”
“Controlling the privacy of online content is difficult and often confusing. We present a social access control where users devise simple questions testing shared knowledge instead of constructing authenticated accounts and explicit access control rules. We implemented a prototype and conducted studies to explore the context of photo sharing security, gauge the difficulty of creating shared knowledge questions, measure their resilience to adversarial attack, and evaluate user ability to understand and predict this resilience.”
“Passwords are ubiquitous, and users and service providers alike rely on them for their security. However, good passwords may sometimes be hard to remember. For years, security practitioners have battled with the dilemma of how to authenticate people who have forgotten their passwords. Existing approaches suffer from high false positive and false negative rates, where the former is often due to low entropy or public availability of information, whereas the latter often is due to unclear or changing answers, or ambiguous or fault prone entry of the same. Good security questions should be based on long-lived personal preferences and knowledge, and avoid publicly available information. We show that many of the questions used by online matchmaking services are suitable as security questions. We first describe a new user interface approach suitable to such security questions that is offering a reduced risks of incorrect entry. We then detail the findings of experiments aimed at quantifying the security of our proposed method.”
“We present a case study of BlueReach, an expertise sharing application that uses synchronous chat to connect question askers with subject-matter experts. We discuss how the solution evolved over time, and the generally high level of acceptance from users and volunteer experts. We include survey findings and usage data, which indicate that in spite of initial concerns that the experts would be overwhelmed by questions, usage has been fairly low and relatively flat. We examine this phenomenon and conclude with a discussion of lessons learned.”
“This case study takes a close look at what novice designers discursively use as evidence to support design decisions. User-centered design has suggested that all design decisions should be made with the concern for the user at the forefront, and, ideally, this concern should be represented by findings discovered within user-centered research. However, the data from a 12-month longitudinal study suggests that although these novice designers are well-versed with user-centered design theory, in practice they routinely do not use user-centered research findings to defend their design decisions. Instead these novice designers use less definitive and more designer-centered forms of evidence. This move away from the user, though perhaps unintentional, may suggest that design pedagogy may need to be re-evaluated to ensure that novice designers continue to adhere to the implications of user-centered research throughout the design process.”
“We are in the midst of an explosion of emerging human-computer interaction techniques that redefine our understanding of both computers and interaction. We propose the notion of Reality-Based Interaction (RBI) as a unifying concept that ties together a large subset of these emerging interaction styles. Based on this concept of RBI, we provide a framework that can be used to understand, compare, and relate current paths of recent HCI research as well as to analyze specific interaction designs. We believe that viewing interaction through the lens of RBI provides insights for design and uncovers gaps or opportunities for future research.”
“This paper presents and evaluates examples from our work with role playing in design education. Rationales for role playing in design are: communication within the design process, the increase of technological complexity, the experience and empathy of designers, the tangibility of interaction, and attentiveness to social change. These rationales inform our inclusion of role playing techniques in design education. Our aim is that the students can and do incorporate the techniques into their own design activity. Here, we focus on three questions: 1. whether the techniques helped the students understand and question interaction, 2. whether the techniques helped students in ideation, and 3. whether the role playing exercises inspired students to use the techniques in own work. We identify several ways in which the techniques are effective for the students in their design work.”
“The differences between Augmented Reality (AR) systems and computer display based systems create a need for a different approach to the design and development of AR systems. To understand the potential of AR systems in real world tasks the technology must be tested in real world scenarios. This case study includes two qualitative user studies where AR was used for giving instructions to users in a hospital. The data show that the users in the context of medical care are positive towards AR systems as a technology and as a tool for instructions in terms of usefulness and social acceptance. The results indicate that AR technology, should it be introduced as technical support in this context, may become an accepted, and appreciated, part of every day work.”
“Native environments are of particular importance in game research, where findings depend even more than usual on the user's mood and comfort level. Using remote voice chat to moderate game research sessions enables researchers to remove the distracting and discomforting physical presence of the moderator, providing a more convincing native environment. This paper describes the benefits and addresses the methodological pitfalls of this approach.”
“This paper demonstrates how human computer interaction (HCI) practitioners utilize an online community to drive commercial product innovation, definition, and development. Upper management's increased interest in user feedback suggests that this development strategy promotes the case for stronger human-centered design processes to be included in corporate strategic planning.”
“This paper reports on the implementation and use of a virtual collaboration system -- a virtual collaborative desk (VCD) that has been introduced to a software design team in an organizational context. Virtual collaboration systems are complex and can be considered as social-technical systems, oftentimes encompassing several layers of both technical and social issues. If this multi-layered social-technical system is to work effectively and provide a dependable service, then all the layers must be well understood and structured accordingly. Otherwise, these layers can become barriers to virtual collaboration if they impede the collaborating users of a virtual team from attaining their goals. An amalgamation of principles from life-cycle and ethnomethodologically informed ethnography approaches in the evaluation of a virtual collaborative system is demonstrated in a case-study to enable researchers to understand what these issues are and how the different types of issues can prevent effective virtual collaboration.”
“One of the biggest struggles user experience teams face is breaking through traditional notions of product strategy, planning and development to bring actionable awareness to the bigger picture around delivering full experiences that people really care about. User research and design is often focused around product & feature design in a space that is defined by out-dated boundaries imposed by history or pre-existing constraints. Research is used to create new features or product direction within these walls, and many design tools are employed to ensure the experience delivered is acceptable. This paper uses a case study of a project titled "Healthy Technology" to highlight the important role that metaphors can play in shifting conversations & strategy, from executive managers to development teams, leading to new boundaries, new strategies, a fresh look at what it means to set direction that targets complete user experiences rather than consumer appreciated features. The metaphor is discussed, through example, as more than a tool for user interface design, exploring the same as a means to alter strategic thinking in upper management as well as guide design and development teams in rethinking notions of technology to create new categories, rethink the problem space and to think beyond features. This paper outlines the research processes that lead to the creation of a metaphor and the functions of the metaphor in overcoming traditional boundaries and thinking. It describes key challenges and methods in this process of moving from research to strategic initiatives that fundamentally shift thinking, providing direction for business models, services, technologies, and industry alignment that come together to provide more than just features or products.”
“This paper is based on projects in which the User Experience (UX) team in Bangalore adopted a User Centered Design approach to increase design buy-in among the developer community of our product and improve working relations with them. This paper provides ethnographical insights into the work practices our developers, their needs & limitations that prevent them from adopting the design process. We share our learning and methods we adopted to address these scenarios.”
“In this paper, we present the design process for developing a technology to support therapists for children with autism. To learn about the domain for which we were designing, one researcher became trained as a therapist and worked as one part time for over 10 months. This case study outlines the process by which the researcher was trained, the ways in which it was helpful in the design and evaluation of a technology system, and the aspects of the experience that we feel led to a better and more successful design.”
“We examine the broad challenges facing a computer-based system to help match low-income domestic workers from an urban slum with potential middle-class employers in Bangalore, India. Due to the near impossibility of implementing such a system in one shot, we first implemented a paper-based system that provides the intended functionality but without a computer. This system proved a significant challenge in itself, and among the lessons learned are the crucial role of human intermediaries (necessary even in the final computer-based system), the importance of building skills among the domestic workers, the need for a strong value proposition for both employers and employees well above existing systems, and the requirement of technological literacy. We then show that these lessons are applicable to other scenarios where computing technology is applied to developing-world challenges, by analyzing corresponding issues in related work. Our broad conclusion is that computer-based systems to solve developing-world problems often require significant work above and beyond an implementation of the technology, with trustworthy human intermediaries playing a critical role.”
“In this case study, we describe a complex pharmaceutical touch screen software development project in which an appealing graphical design on top of a well-thought user interface elevate the benefits of a good user interface design. Based on this specific case, we emphasis the importance of a clear and simple navigation and interaction in a complex pharmaceutical touch screen application.”
“Based on ethnographically-inspired research in Japan, we report on people's experiences using digital money payment systems that use Sony's FeliCa near-field communication smartcard technology. As an example of ubiquitous computing in the here and now, the adoption of digital money is found to be messy and contingent, shot through with cultural and social factors that do not hinder this adoption but rather constitute its specific character. Adoption is strongly tied to Japanese conceptions of the aesthetic and moral virtue of smooth flow and avoidance of commotion, as well as the excitement at winning something for nothing. Implications for design of mobile payment systems stress the need to produce open-ended platforms that can serve as the vehicle for multiple meanings and experiences without foreclosing such possibilities in the name of efficiency.”
“In this paper we present work on a scenario and persona based approach to exploring social software solutions for a globally distributed network of researchers, designers and artists. We discuss issues identified with scenario based approaches and a potential participatory solution adopted in this project.”
“Inflatable Mouse is a volume-adjustable user interface. It can be inflated up to the volume of a familiar mouse, but be deflated and stored flat in a PC card slot of a laptop computer when not in use. Inflatable Mouse functions just like a typical mouse; moreover, it provides new interaction techniques by sensing the air pressure in the balloon of the mouse. It also addresses some issues associated with pressure-sensing interactions such as the lack of bi-directional input and the lack of effective feedback. Moreover, it can be used as both a control tool and a display tool. In this paper, the design of an Inflatable Mouse prototype is described and potential application scenarios such as zooming in/out and fast scrolling using pressure control are explained. We also discuss the potential use of Inflatable Mouse as an emotional communication tool.”
“We present a unique interface design for mobile devices that addresses major user pain points with deep menu systems and page scrolling. Using a series of 1-5 wheels of content, arranged in a combination-lock style on a single mobile screen, this design enables a user to consume a multitude of personalized internet and web content without ever scrolling up/down or selecting from a menu. Additionally, the wheels are easily mapped to a personalized PC experience such as those from My MSN, live.com, and myYahoo!, enabling users to access their PC content from anywhere. Results from iterative testing across US, Japan, and China show the model to be an effective and desirable mode of consuming personal and internet content on the mobile device, despite very different navigation paradigms and cultural expectations in each of the countries.”
“In the Special Moment project we prototype and evaluate the design of interfaces for casual sound recording devices. These devices are envisioned to be used by a casual user to capture and store their everyday experiences in the form of "sound albums" -- collections of recordings related to a certain situation. We formulate a number of design principles for such recording devices, as well as implement and evaluate two working prototypes. A candle recorder allows for capturing the general atmosphere at a party, and the children's book recorder records the interactions between parents and children while reading a book together.”
“This paper explains the development of an information terminal for a rural station and its background system. The information terminal, which we call 'IT scarecrow', displays traffic information based on a train location system. It is designed like a scarecrow to blend into a rural station. The service the system provides depends mainly on passengers' surveys and discussions with the rural community. In addition, we tried to make the system at low cost. In the spring of 2007, we made some preliminary system tests followed by an experiment in an actual station. As a result, we learned what the critical conditions for the next implementation should be. The IT scarecrow is consulted as a representative of communication between a railway and a local community. We hope the system will expand and also that it be implemented as a mobile guidance system.”
“This study investigates the effect of the follower and leader vehicles' speed on time headway variation during deceleration in a car-following task. Significant results were found in deceleration onset; headway varies significantly when absolute and relative follower speed are high. These results suggest possible application in the tuning of in-vehicle advanced system for longitudinal safety control.”
“Previous Human Factors studies in the automotive field showed that drivers performance is influenced by the type of Force Feedback (FF) reproduced by the steering wheel. In the present study, six FF were compared. Results suggest that the effect of the type of FF depend on the specific driving scenario, thus suggesting the utility of an adaptive force feedback based steering wheel. In the final part of the paper, we describe how such a system could be implemented.”
“In this paper, we present a new technology to perform multi Tangible User Interface (TUI) tracking on standard LC-displays. A lot of existing technologies for tangible user interface tracking use back- or front-projection setups, but they suffer from poor image quality, shadow casting, non-ergonomic interaction, and/or large installations. Thus, we introduce a principle that allows using the InfrActables_ technology [3] on a large LC-display. It combines simultaneous multiuser input on a display with the advantages of a large flat screen. We use infrared photodiodes (IR-LEDs) mounted behind the display_s LC-matrix to track infrared diodes in front of the screen. After initial tests concerning the infrared transparency and sensor characteristics, we developed a proof of concept consisting of 384 sensors, which are addressed through a modular master-slave circuit. Using several interaction devices, multiuser interaction is possible.”
“In this paper we describe adaptations to the classical Extreme Programming (XP) process. The approach described integrates HCI (human computer interaction) instruments. The implemented HCI instruments are: user studies, extreme personas (a variation of the personas approach), usability expert evaluations, usability tests, and automated usability evaluations. By combining XP and UCD (user centered development) processes we take advantages of both approaches.”
“Improving the users' experience is a common goal of both software engineering and usability engineering. However, although practitioners of both disciplines collaborate in practice, development processes often rely on a sequential division of labor, and thus limit the effectiveness of a meeting of different perspectives. In this paper, we report on experiences we made in both academia and industry as we put an agile development process pattern to the test -- combining Extreme Programming and Scenario-Based Usability Engineering, based on a blend of perspectives on equal terms.”
“In this paper we describe the merger of user centered design into agile (team) development practice as manifest in a one day design studio. Benefits and challenges to a design studio approach are discussed, and the evolution of one design using the design studio process is presented.”
“We describe the design of bluemail, a web-based email system that provides message tagging, message threading, and email folders. We wanted to explore how this combination of features would help users manage and organize their email. We conducted a limited field test of the prototype by observing how users triage their own email using bluemail. Our study identified ways in which users liked tagging, threading, and foldering capabilities, but also some of the complex ways in which they can interact. Our study elicited early user input to guide the iterative design of these features. It also involved a user study researcher, designer, and developer in the field test to quickly integrate different perspectives during development.”
“We investigate the effect of placement and user mobility on the time required to access an on-body interface. In our study, a wrist-mounted system was significantly faster to access than a device stored in the pocket or mounted on the hip. In the latter two conditions, 78% of the time it took to access the device was spent retrieving the device from its holder. As mobile devices are beginning to include peripherals (for example, Bluetooth headsets and watches connected to a mobile phone stored in the pocket), these results may help guide interface designers with respect to distributing functions across the body between peripherals.”
“In this case study we describe the details of a PC Internet deprivation study used to gather information on mobile Internet needs. Eight participants in our study used a mobile device as their only means of Internet access for four days. The case study describes details of the research methodology as well as design insights and implications that resulted from the study.”
“This paper is a case study of how exploratory, qualitative interview findings were communicated to product teams through the visual design language of comics.”
“Given that heuristic evaluation (HE) is a popular evaluation method among practitioners despite criticisms surrounding its performance and reliability, there is a need to improve the method's performance. Several studies have shown HE-Plus, an emerging variant of HE, to outperform HE in both effectiveness and reliability. HE-Plus uses the same set of heuristics as HE; the only difference between these two methods is the 'usability problems profile' element in HE-Plus. This paper reports our attempt to verify the original profile employed in HE-Plus based on usability problem classification in the User Action Framework and an experiment evaluating its outcome by comparing HE with two HE variants using a profile (HE-Plus and HE++) and a control group. Our results confirmed the role of the 'usability problems profiles' on improving the performance and reliability of heuristic evaluation: both HE-Plus and HE++ outperformed HE in terms of effectiveness as well as reliability.”
“This case study discusses a 2-week field trial of Google Maps for Mobile with 24 participants (in London, Manchester, Hamburg, Munich). The field trial served as a pilot, because it combined many methods previously used individually: group briefing sessions, recorded usage, multiple telephone interviews for additional context around recorded use, and 1:1 debriefs in a lab setting with the development team observing. In this paper we describe our approach, as well as substantive and methodological findings. Insights were gained along several dimensions: user experience at different levels of product familiarity (e.g. from download/install to habitual use); specific usability fixes (100+) as well as product strategy drivers; and hurdles to user experience arising from the mobile eco-system (e.g. carrier and handset platforms).”
“In usability testing, we place great importance on authentic tasks, real users, and the appropriate fidelity of prototypes, considering them carefully in our efforts to simulate people's real-life interactions with our products. We often place less importance on the data with which we ask participants to interact. Commonly, test data are fabricated, created for participants to imagine as their own. But relating to artificial data can be difficult for participants, and this difficulty can affect their behavior and ultimately call our research results into question. Incorporating users' real data into your usability test requires additional time and effort, along with certain considerations, but it can lead to richer and more valid usability results.”
“In this work, we introduce the use of tags to support the near synchronous use of instant messaging. As a proof-of-concept, we developed a plug-in in Lotus Sametime, an enterprise IM client. Our plug-in supports tasks that do not need immediate attention and tasks that have deadlines. A trial deployment and survey shows that users can see the potential usefulness of such a tagging system in their IM communication. Furthermore, users rated our design intuitive and easy to use. Longer study is needed to explore communication norms that results from its use.”
“The Renaissance ideal can be expressed as a creative synthesis between cultural disciplines, standing in stark contrast to our traditional focus on scientific specialization. This panel presents a number of experts who approach the synthesis of art and science as the modus operandi for their work, using it as a tool for creativity, research, and practice. Understanding these approaches allows us to identify the roles of synthesis in successful innovation and improve the implementation of interdisciplinary synthesis in research and practice.”
“In this interactive session, a panel of experts will discuss and debate an emerging and pressing issue: To have maximum impact on the user experience, how and where should a User Research team be structured within a corporation whose business depends on the development of successful interactive products through cross-functional collaboration? This has significant implications for organizations such as user experience, marketing, design, strategy, and academic programs preparing students entering corporate environments.”
“Established researchers and practitioners active in the development and deployment of media spaces review what seemed to be promised twenty years ago, what has actually been achieved, and what we might anticipate over the next twenty years.”
“User Experience evangelism inside an organization is a frequent topic. Methods for marketing user centered design to internal stakeholders have been analyzed in many papers and on panels. Emerging media and new venues have recently presented an opportunity to reexamine methods and goals for external user experience marketing and evangelism. This interactive panel will address motivations and brainstorm about discount methods for promoting the role of the human factors profession to the general public, and communicating directly with the end users. This will be contrasted with the position that a well designed product should market itself, and that money is best spent on design and internal evangelism instead. The panel itself will involve 3 parts: 1. Moderator collecting answers to the "What would you do with a 1 million dollar UX marketing budget?" question via index cards. 2. Four panelists presenting short sales pitch proposing what they would do when faced with the same question. 3. Panel discussion focusing on the contributions from the audience and focused on producing two lists. One would include specific user experience marketing venues (targeted bloggers, un-conferences, think tanks, specific ad words, design-friendly printed publications like Business Week, etc.). The second list would focus on goals and of user experience marketing (raising awareness and promoting better image of user experience vs. engineering and other disciplines, increased sales, better brand, recruiting, swaying executives, etc.). The panel would continue to live after external publication of the two lists, with
