The volume of images available online has increased significantly but the choices offered by image retrieval systems have not kept pace. We describe the design and evaluation of a `high density' image search interface focusing on the results pages. We quantitatively and qualitatively compared image presentation on a high density interface with a traditional image search interface. Our results show that users had major problems with high-density interfaces for images due to information overload. We point to further work which could improve the user experience.
Restoring mobility and rehabilitation of gait are high priorities for rehabilitation of neurological conditions. Cueing using metronomic rhythmic sensory stimulation has been shown to improve gait, but most versions of this approach have used auditory and visual cues. In contrast, I propose the development of a prototype wearable system for rhythmic cueing based on haptics. The main aim of my research is to investigate how real-time gait monitoring and rhythmic haptic cueing can assist with gait rehabilitation for neurological conditions.
This paper proposes a gamification design of a Cultural Probes (CP) in the context of the Smart Grid. CP is a well-known HCI technique used to inform and inspire applications design. Gamification aims to enhance the participation of users in CP tasks. Participants are children who develop tasks to provide designers with information about families' habits of energy consumption, and their knowledge and interest in energy related issues. We use a narrative that engages the player in the mission of saving people wasting energy crazily, under the influence of an evil wizard.
A social-like environment for a meaningful Human-IoT collaboration has been previously analysed from the perspective of conveying common goals amongst network participants. However, a clearly defined methodology for their implementation of physical systems is required. This work-in-progress paper provides an exploration of the TAFEI framework as a tool for the design and implementation of smart objects from a usability standpoint, in which a detailed description of a system and its user's interactions could be used by the system designer to architect better interfaces and interaction experiences, focusing on usability and opportunities for `intelligent' IoT behaviour.
A computer system (Direct2Inmate) has been developed to assist prisoners to manage typical daily living tasks such as ordering meals, registering for educational programmes, making health appointments, personal entertainment and much more.The system is available worldwide via kiosks and tablet PCs.We investigate if this digital technology meets the needs of prisoners who have low computer and reading literacies.In considering a prisoner's persona, researchers have identified that emotions in prisons are volatile and can be heightened due to usability issues with interactive technologies, which can be disruptive and result in unwanted behaviours.With this in mind, we evaluated the system's user interface using usability testing and we recorded usability metrics in addition to the facial and verbal behaviours of prisoners whilst they interacted with the system.
Creative professionals such as journalists and copywriters are an important group of users who need to search for images as part of their work task. We describe the design and evaluation of a `high density' image search interface targeted at this user group. We use a field evaluation together with a qualitative approach with creative professionals to gather feedback on the high density interface design. Our results show that creative professional viewed the interface favourably because they were able to get a quick overview of research results. We make suggestions for the appropriateness of high density interfaces for different work contexts, and further work in terms of layouts of images in high density interfaces.
A considerable part of everyday communication is online based nowadays. To imagine life without the daily (or even hourly) usage of WhatsApp seems impossible for many people. The present exploratory study (N=135) takes a closer look at the usage of WhatsApp and the psychological consequences. Our study highlights correlations and differences of the usage and experience of specific WhatsApp features (single chats and group chats, Last Seen and Read Receipts) with perceived communication quality and wellbeing, also drawing relations to psychological theory such as human needs framework and need to belong. A high number of single chats was positively correlated with perceived communication profundity but also with perceived stress, and waste of time. Moreover, wellbeing was affected by the individual usage mode and experience of WhatsApp features. For example, perceived stress was significantly higher among participants with active usage of Read Receipts than with passive usage and especially participants who feel stressed by Read Receipts, agreeing to be more relaxed without them, considered WhatsApp communication a waste of time. We discuss implications of our findings on the level of personal usage behaviour as well as HCI research and design in general. We highlight the challenges for the individual to customize technology to support a healthy use in daily life. Finally, the present study emphasizes the need for user experience evaluation on a fine-grained level, taking focus on single features and their consequences, and recognising how their activation or deactivation can eventually change the product character as a whole.
For the past decade it has been a common thing to notice mobile phone users using their devices in many different environments, but in recent years the rapid evolution of smartphones with improved touch screen and interactive capabilities has led to a rise in usage whilst on the move. This paper presents the results of an experiment with student users to help explore the performance of a tilt-based text input application on smartphone devices. This experiment considered 2 independent variables with 4 conditions: grip (one-handed, two-handed) and mobility (sitting, walking). The study involved 12 participants aged 18 - 26 who were each required to carry out numerous selection tasks for each condition. This paper explains the methods behind the experiment along with the test procedure have been implemented, it attempts to justify major decisions that have been made and includes an in-depth critical reflection of the findings. The qualitative results of the study unveiled interesting evidence of more errors whilst on the move, with the optimal condition being sitting using a two-handed grip. Qualitative results from a survey after the experiment revealed similar findings, that users found it much easier to use the application whilst sitting, and sitting one handed being the easiest condition. A similar experiment was previously carried out in 2013 which explores the same tilt-based application but under a different testing environment and the performance of a younger user group, the study highlighted the potential value of tilt as a technique for text input for teenage users. This study expands on previous research and identifies that there is a much greater chance for users to perform interactive tasks worse when using smartphone applications on the move instead of using them sitting down.
With the modernization of the world, people have led into more stressful lifestyles. Due to long lasting stress, many individuals experience anxiety conditions and this problem has become a common problem in every society of the world. To solve this issue, technology has come into play with suggestions of different types of solutions. In this paper we have come up with a proposal that can become a future work in the human computer interaction field, which suggests an intelligent and interactive companion supported with wearable technology to monitor the stress level of the user and a controllable environment with the potential of recreating moments, in order to avoid anxiety. Although there are existing wearable devices that help to monitor stress levels and some initial level research has been done to come up with companions to reduce stress, integration of a wearable device along with an interactive companion will be a newer level of research. Also identifying and capturing environmental factors which affects one's stress level and changing environmental factors to reduce the stress level, is a less studied area. Therefore the suggested future work exposes a research area which has the capability of expanding a lot in the future.
For decades, film, video, and television have been entertaining a global audience and delivering important information or news. However, in recent years the Internet added a novel distribution channel for film, bypassing established routes like TV broadcasts and thus, changing the way TV and film are consumed. These scripted episodic and sometimes experimental videos for the web are often labeled as webisodes. While the distribution of webisodes is mainly characterized by on-demand online streaming the act of creating this novel format is highly diverse, highly cooperative and draws heavily on information technology. This work in progress paper is a first step to better understand this community. To this end, we recruited and interviewed eight persons, four producers of traditional films and four producers of webisodes. From our data we derived a set of observations and claims that we use for discussion and future research.
The advent of the social web such as twitter, facebook and the numerous social forums have provided a rich source of data representing human beliefs, social interactions and opinions that can be analysed. In this paper we show how extracting user sentiment by text mining posts from popular gaming forums can be used to identify user experience problems and issues that can adversely effect the enjoyment and gaming experience for the customers. The users posts are downloaded, preprocessed and parsed, we label the posts as negative, positive or neutral in terms of sentiment. We then identify key areas for game play improvement based on the frequency counts of keywords and key phrases used by the fora members. Furthermore, computational models based on complex network theory can rank the issues and provide knowledge about the relationships between them.
Car/ride sharing concepts are getting more and more popular, mainly due to the more economical and environment-friendly nature. Most of the popular car/ride service providers offer specialized mobile apps so that users can access their services anywhere anytime. Recently, few of these providers have also launched smartwatch apps for a quick and flexible access. Due to the new medium and the given constrains of smartwatches (e.g., small size, dependency on mobile, etc.), user studies are needed to be done in order to properly find out user requirements and expectations. In this work, we conducted three surveys (to find out user requirements and expectations) and a two-months long study with two users (to get user experience feedback over a long period of time). The feedbacks of these surveys and the user study can help researchers and designers in making design and development decisions for future versions of this kind of apps.
Simon Klakegg, Niels van Berkel, Aku Visuri, Chu Luo, Jorge Goncalves, Simo Hosio, Hanna-Leena Huttunen, Denzil Ferreira Center for Ubiquitous Computing, University of Oulu Interaction Design Lab, University of Melbourne simon.klakegg@oulu.fi, n.vanberkel@student.unimelb.edu.au, aku.visuri@oulu.fi, chul3@student.unimelb.edu.au, jorge.goncalves@unimelb.edu.au, simo.hosio@oulu.fi, hanna-leena.huttunen@oulu.fi, denzil.ferreira@oulu.fi
Two key challenges in education relate to how traditional educational providers can personalise online provisions to the students' skill level, optimise the use of tools and increase both the generation and utilisation of feedback (in terms of timing, content, and subsequent use by students). The application of traditional programmes in the online setting is often complicated by the legacy of traditional universities infrastructures, knowledge bases (or lack thereof in the human-computer-interaction/HCI realm), and pedagogical priorities. It is here that HCI experts (designers and researchers) can have real-world impact in line with macro-HCI, while also being able to test new innovations in collaboration with educators (e.g., the practitioners in such education settings). In this note, we make a case that the HCI community is in a situation where it can make a significant contribution to traditional providers in two prospective areas: personalisation, feedback generation and increased feedback utilisation.
We conducted a small-scale study in order to explore students' perceptions of the learning processes when engaged as co-authors of content for collaborative higher order thinking skills learning tasks. We specifically designed the process to allow for self-critique – where authors can observe their creations being solved and therefore understand where they may improve their design. We collected data over a three-day period from a sample of twelve thirteen year olds, working in teams, authoring content for Digital Mysteries (a higher order thinking skills collaborative learning application based on the digital tabletop). The study was structured to follow Bloom's taxonomy, a continuum of cognitive skills that develop during a learning process. We found that 1) rather than follow this continuum, skills developed in a non-linear manner due to the abstract nature of the authoring activity, and 2) the students' demonstrated good metacognitive insights into the authoring task, technology and collaborative learning as a whole.
This paper reports the result of a study that we conducted to develop an instrument for measuring sensemaking and to understand how sensemakers conceptualise the sensemaking that they are doing. To address these aims we conducted a review of how sensemaking is described in the literature and derived a series of features. These were used to construct a questionnaire, which we deployed in an experimental study in which participants performed a sensemaking task. The results help to validate the questionnaire and provide insights into how users think about the experience of sensemaking.
The interaction authors are collaborators of The Virtual Cuneiform Tablet Reconstruction (VCTR) Project - an international collaboration inspired by the ambition to support virtual access to cuneiform artefacts and to reconstruct cuneiform tablets by joining virtual fragments together. The project aims to support and resource low-cost and easy-to-use 3D acquisition systems, advance automated virtual reconstruction algorithms, evolve a collaborative reconstruction environment and facilitate interactive on-line 3D archiving. The author disciplines include Computer Science, Electronic Engineering and Assyriology.
User instructions in the form of password policy or creation suggestion play an important role in helping users understand and comply with the requirements of a password creation system (PCS). Current implementations of user instructions are very varied and may cause users confusion as they move from one PCS to another which can in turn affect their password choice. Therefore, this paper investigates what kinds of instructions are provided by PCSs to support users in creating passwords and how the most frequently used instructions affect users’ password creation behaviour. An analysis of a total of 95 instructions were extracted from 27 PCSs was undertaken. Based on this analysis, an online study with 117 respondents investigated how the most frequently used instructions affect users’ password creation behaviour. The results revealed that current implementations of user instructions for password policy and creation suggestion in the PCSs do not match users’ need in creating passwords. Users prefer declarative policy before they interact with a PCS. However, they prefer procedural policy during and after their interaction with a PCS. For creation suggestions, users prefer declarative suggestions before, during and after interaction with a PCS.
Recent developments in information and communication technologies have left interaction design and human-computer interaction (HCI) with something of a conceptual gap. The distinction between physical and digital spaces is increasingly blurred. Cloud-based services have enabled a separation of information content from device so that content can be accessed and manipulated across multiple devices and locations. The user experience (UX) frequently needs to deal with activities that transition across physical and digital spaces and ecosystems of devices and services. Designers can no longer prescribe the journey or curate experiences simply as isolated interactions. Instead, UX must be consistently spread across touchpoints, channels, and device ecosystems. Our contribution to the development of UX, interaction design, and information architecture is to appeal to the notions of cross channel user experiences and blended spaces. Information architecture is the pervasive layer that underlies interactions that cross services, devices and blended physical and digital spaces. Information architecture is the structure within which the UX unfolds. From this perspective, we highlight the importance of creating meaningful places for experience and navigation through blended spaces.
We designed, illustrated, and developed Secure Comics, an online educational interactive comic series about cyber security and privacy.The three-part comic was evaluated with adults and children, and had positive effects
