Human-Computer Interaction – INTERACT 2015

In recent times, visual analysis has become increasingly important, especially in the area of software measurement, as most of the data from software measurement is multivariate. In this regard, standard software analysis tools are limited by their lack of ability to process huge collections of multidimensional data sets; current tools are designed to either support only well-known metrics or are too complicated to use for generating custom software metrics. Furthermore, the analyst requires extensive knowledge of the underlying data schemas and the relevant querying language. To address these shortcomings, we propose an interactive visual approach that focuses on visual elements, their configurations, and interconnectivity rather than a data ontology and querying language. In order to test and validate our methodology, we developed a prototype tool called VIMETRIK (Visual Specification of Metrics). Our preliminary evaluation study illustrates the intuitiveness and ease-of-use of our approach to understand software measurement and analysis data.

Usability is an important aspect of Free-Libre Open Source Software (FLOSS), but barriers exist for usability specialists’ participation in such projects. Organizational boundary literature is interested in the tensions of online communities, including FLOSS communities. While this literature recognizes the importance of managing boundaries in online communities, little empirical research has been conducted on actual gatekeeping tactics project members perform against outsiders’ contributions. Based on several years of engaged research with FLOSS projects, we characterize three gatekeeping tactics in FLOSS projects: non-response, social exclusion, and false acceptance. They all have hindered usability work. We also offer examples of usability specialists and their contributions succeeding in avoiding these gatekeeping tactics in FLOSS projects. This paper provides an important contribution to the boundary management literature through detailed examination of gatekeeping tactics in action, as well as to the Human Computer Interaction literature interested in contributing to FLOSS projects through usability work.

Synchronizing efforts between developers and user experience (UX) specialists is one of the major challenges in agile UX work. In this paper, we report results of a study conducted over a release cycle of six agile software development projects in five companies, considering the task allocation and cooperation in the team. Team members (N = 31), including product owners, UX specialists, and developers, reported weekly on the UX-related tasks they had contributed to and whether the UX specialist had participated. We identified three forms of cooperation: minimal, product owner–UX specialist, and developer–UX specialist. Our study suggests that for projects operating in the minimal cooperation mode, the collaboration concentrates on the user interface (UI) design, while other aspects of UX work are downplayed. At the same time, many UX-related tasks were successfully handled by developers alone. Therefore, to support UX work integration, we suggest a task-oriented integration approach for projects with minimal UX resources.

Breathing techniques have been widely used as an aid in stress-reduction and relaxation exercises. Most breathing assistance systems present breathing guidance in visual or auditory forms. In this study, we explored a tactile interface of a breathing assistance system by using a shape-changing airbag. We hypothesized that it would help users perform the breathing exercise more effectively and enhance their relaxing experience. The feasibility of the tactile interface was evaluated from three aspects: stress reduction, breathing training and interface usability. The results showed that for most participants, the overall heart rate variability were improved after breathing training. Moreover, “Breathe with Touch” brought users better satisfaction during the exercise. We discuss these results and future design implications for designing tactile interfaces for breathing guidance.

Technology is increasingly available to end users of low socioeconomic status (SES), yet little is known about how these users’ values affect the interfaces they prefer when seeking information related to their child’s health. We investigate low-SES parents’ preferences when it comes to technology to track and learn about their child’s developmental milestones using both qualitative and quantitative analyses. We follow the methods outlined by Value Sensitive Design (VSD) and found that the three most relevant values for information seeking are Convenience, Learning/Bonding and Trust. We also discuss how these values drive their technology preferences in tracking their child’s developmental milestones. We also present a series of design principles for information communication technology for low-SES user groups that were derived directly from our qualitative research with 51 participants. We note that although working in this unique problem space necessitated following an abridged VSD paradigm our results align with the core set of values suggested by VSD.

Communication between people with dementia and others becomes increasingly difficult as the disease progresses. Symptoms such as memory loss, speech impairments and limitations in higher cognitive functions affect people’s abilities for communication and social interaction. At the same time, meaningful interactions with others are important for the quality of life of people with dementia. In this paper, we describe our work in designing technology probes and testing them with target users to understand how multimedia could be utilized to support the communication of people with dementia through memories.

Population aging leads to more expensive social security and medical care in a society. In order to minimize national expenditure dedicated to providing support to the elderly, it is necessary to reduce the cost of treatment. Current prophylactic approaches mainly include training programs tailored towards seniors, who may be assisted by caregivers, for wellness maintenance and enhancement. However, these approaches are mainly administered by volunteers, who are often overburdened because of labor shortages. It is thus necessary to design and implement a system that enables seniors to maintain and improve their health by themselves. In this study, we propose and test a smartphone-based gait measurement application. Our results indicate that the mobile application can help motivate seniors to walk more regularly and improve their walking ability. Moreover, we found in our experiments that since our application helped improve our senior subjects’ physical fitness, some of them became interested in participating in social activities and using new technologies as a consequence.

Archives of historical and cultural data, such as the UK’s National Archives, receive huge volumes of enquiries from users. These have been seldom systematically studied, despite the obvious benefits to the organisations concerned and interaction designers. The literature looking at the spectrum of remote communications carried out by a modern archive is sparse. Similarly, there is a lack of information about the problems users are having with archival information systems, and no information on the distribution of problems or where in users’ information seeking journeys they occur. This paper reports on a mixed-method study using content analysis and grounded theory to address these gaps in the literature. The results of the study indicate that users primarily are encountering problems knowing where to start looking or where to look next in their information seeking journeys. Further, these problems seem to create a deep anxiety or uncertainty in archive users which drives them to seek reassurance and guidance from human archivists, who will provide the type of disambiguation and support that current information systems do not. The paper closes with implications of this work on the future prioritisation of design practice and research in online archives.

Online reviews, or electronic word of mouth (eWOM), are an essential source of information for people making decisions about products and services, however they are also susceptible to abuses such as spamming and defamation. Therefore when making decisions, readers must determine if reviews are credible. Yet relatively little research has investigated how people make credibility judgments of online reviews. This paper presents quantitative and qualitative results from a survey of 1,979 respondents, showing that attributes of the reviewer and review content influence credibility ratings. Especially important for judging credibility is the level of detail in the review, whether or not it is balanced in sentiment, and whether the reviewer demonstrates expertise. Our findings contribute to the understanding of how people judge eWOM credibility, and we suggest how eWOM platforms can be designed to coach reviewers to write better reviews and present reviews in a manner that facilitates credibility judgments.

In today’s globalized world, it is increasingly important for companies to gain knowledge about international markets and to understand the differences and similarities between international users. As a result, international user studies have become more common. However, they still pose a challenge for most companies. In this paper, we present the results of an empirical investigation of how companies conduct international user studies. We describe the empirical findings in detail, with an emphasis on the practices and challenges that are specific to the process of doing international user studies. Key findings concern where, geographically, companies choose to collect data; the scope and scale of the studies; as well as the preferred data collection methods and employed control mechanisms. Our research shows that strategic/pragmatic considerations, perceived differences in national culture, and concerns about data quality shape and delimit the approach that companies take to international user studies.

The diversity, which is intrinsic to open data, affects intuitiveness and acceptance from the end users perspective. While the existing visualization techniques provide various ways to exploit open data in different domains, they still lack mechanisms to capture generality and flexibility across highly heterogeneous data representations that are crucial in the open data domain. We propose a novel visualization approach that exploits an entity-centric representation of open data. The key idea is that people intuitively perceive things as entities and categorize them according to their similarities and differences. The approach is supported by a UI architecture that allows aligning underlying open data described by the entities with a meaningful user experience. A preliminary user study shows the feasibility of our approach and its potential in turning the exploitation of open data catalogues into a positive user experience.

In recent years, attention has increased around the delivery of mindfulness interventions by means of new technology such as via the smartphone [

1

]. However, less research has been devoted to investigating how digital games can enable and facilitate mindfulness training. This study demonstrates how mindfulness can be improved by using technology, in particular digital games. Based on the work of Bergomi et al. [

2

], mindfulness is defined as an inherent capacity in human beings that can be trained, which is explored within the structure of an eight-factor model. For each mindfulness factor identified by the research of Bergomi et al., appropriate games are presented together with research evidence showing their efficacy for mindfulness training. Effective games are disaggregated according to their mechanics, dynamics, and aesthetics [

3

] to provide design recommendations for game developers.

We consider the use of physical and virtual objects having one or more affordances associated to simple interactions with them. Based on Kaptelinin and Nardi’s notion of instrumental affordance, we investigate what it means to break an affordance, and the two ensuing questions we deem most important: how users may (i) achieve their goals in the presence of such broken affordances, and may (ii) repurpose or otherwise interact with artefacts with broken affordances. We argue that (A) thorough analyses of breakdowns of affordances and their associated signifiers and feedbacks have implication for design, particularly so for virtual artefacts, and that (B) there is a largely unexplored design space for designing, and redesigning objects with broken affordances, rather than broken or decayed objects.

Understanding a worker’s perspective when introducing robots at humans’ workplaces is crucial to improve human-robot interaction in production environments. Taking a temporal perspective on workers’ experiences with robots, we explored expectations and general attitudes as well as actual feelings and reflections regarding the deployment of robots in a semiconductor factory. To evoke reports on workers’ experiences, we applied a narrative interview technique with 10 workers. To characterize the temporal transition of workers’ experiences, we distinguished between three phases in the deployment process: expectations before the deployment of the robots, familiarization with the robots, and experienced consequences of working with the robots. We present characteristic experiences of each phase and describe how these experiences change over time regarding the perceived functional value of the robots, work organization, feelings, social environment, and attitudes. Overall, our research contributes leverage points towards a more positive experience of workers when deploying robots in a factory.

Locating an object in an unfamiliar and dense physical environment, such as a control room, supermarket, or warehouse, can be challenging. In this paper, we present the

Projection

-

Augmented Arm (PAA)

, a motorized robotic arm augmented with a pico-projector to help users to localize targets in such environments. The arm moves and displays a projected spotlight on the target. We present the results of a study that shows that the PAA helps users to more quickly locate target objects in a dense environment. We further study the influence of the visibility of the projected spotlight while moving versus that of the physical movement of the projection arm on user performance and search strategy, finding that (1) information about the orientation of the arm has a stronger impact on performance than moving spotlight projected on the search space; (2) the orientation of the arm is useful (24 % improvement) and especially when the target is behind the user (26 % improvement); and (3) users’ strategies relied mainly on the arm when it is visible.

In the emerging world of human-robot interaction, people and robots will work together to achieve joint objectives. This paper discusses the design and validation of a general scheme for creating emotionally expressive behaviours for robots, in order that people might better interpret how a robot collaborator is succeeding or failing in its work. It exemplifies a unified approach to creating robot behaviours for two very different robot forms, based on combinations of four groups of design parameters (approach/avoidance, energy, intensity and frequency). 59 people rated video clips of robots performing expressive behaviours both for emotional expressivity on Valence-Arousal-Dominance dimensions, and their judgement of the successfulness of the robots’ work. Results are discussed in terms of the utility of expressive behaviour for facilitating human understanding of robot intentions and the design of cues for basic emotional states.

Recent developments in the area of stereoscopic displays and tracking technologies have paved the way to combine touch interaction on interactive surfaces with spatial interaction above the surface of a stereoscopic display. This holistic design space supports novel affordances and user experiences during touch interaction, but also induce challenges to the interaction design. In this paper we introduce the concept of hover interaction for such setups. Therefore, we analyze the non-visual volume above a virtual object, which is perceived as the corresponding hover space for that object. The results show that the users’ perceptions of hover spaces can be categorized into two groups. Either users assume that the shape of the hover space is extruded and scaled towards their head, or along the normal vector of the interactive surface. We provide a corresponding model to determine the shapes of these hover spaces, and confirm the findings in a practical application. Finally, we discuss important implications for the development of future touch-sensitive interfaces.

In this paper we explore the use of in situ occlusion resolution in mixed physical/digital tabletop scenarios. We propose the extension of back-projected tabletops with interactive top-projection to turn the physical object’s surface into peripheral displays. These displays are used to resolve occlusion in situ without the need to use additional tabletop display space and keeping the spatial perception of the occluded objects. We contribute a visualization concept and a set of interaction techniques for in situ occlusion resolution and easy access to occluded objects. The techniques are implemented in a system named ProjecTop, which is evaluated in an quantitative user study. The study results highlight how top-projection can be beneficially used. We conclude with a set of design implications derived from the study’s results.

MovemenTable (

MT

) is an exploration of moving interactive tabletops which can physically move, gather together or depart according to people’s dynamically varying interaction tasks and collaborative needs. We present the design and implementation of a set of

MT

prototypes and discuss a technique that allows

MT

to augment its visual content in order to provide motion cues to users. We outline a set of interaction scenarios using single and multiple

MTs

in public, social and collaborative settings and discuss four user studies based on these scenarios, assessing how people perceive

MT

movements, how these movements affect their interaction, and how synchronized movements of multiple

MTs

impacts people’s collaborative interactions. Our findings confirm that

MT’s

augmentation of its visual content was helpful in providing motion cues to users, and that

MT

’s movement had significant effects on people’s spatial behaviors during interaction, effects that peaked in collaborative scenarios with multiple

MTs

.

A diary approach was used to explore location-sharing preferences of 126 parents with young children with the goal of investigating which elements play a role in their decision to share their location. During a 3-week user study, we daily collected parents’ preferences of location sharing along with data related to the physical and social context, their interest in socializing with other parents and their emotional states. Our analysis points out several insights for this previously underexplored user group. In particular, our results suggest a relative greater importance of the context, both physical and social, with respect to individual traits such as personality, trust dispositions, and demographic characteristics. Moreover positive and negative emotions seem to influence the intention to share location information in a peculiar way: positive moods like happiness seem to encourage private sharing with selected people such as partner, relatives, friends and nearby parents, yet, when parents experience a negative mood, such as being worried, angry or sad, their intention to share publicly on the web is higher.

Mobile applications provide increasingly complex functionality through form-based user interfaces, which requires effective solutions for navigation on small-screen devices. This paper contributes a comparative usability evaluation of four navigation design patterns: Scrolling, Tabs, Menus, and Collapsible Fieldsets. These patterns were evaluated in a case study on social network profile pages. Results show that memorability, usability, overview, and subjective preference were worse in Scrolling than in the other patterns. This indicates that designers of form-based user interfaces on small-screen devices should not rely on Scrolling to support navigation, but use other design patterns instead.

A common issue on live sports TV broadcasts happens when a viewer hears a neighbour screaming a goal before watching it on his TV. Similarly, viewers will also have a disruptive experience if a second screen application, designed to present information synchronised with the live TV broadcast, displays information beforehand. This paper presents a simple and universal synchronisation mechanism for second screen mobile applications, which does not rely on automatic content recognition, but rather on user feedback to help users achieve a pleasant and effective second screen experience. Results from user tests helped validate our approach, as users were able to synchronise a mobile application with a simulated live TV broadcast, with different delays.

Until now, research on projector-camera systems had only concentrated on user-interaction within a lab-environment. As a result of this, there are very limited insights into how such systems could be used in everyday life. It was therefore our aim to investigate requirements and use cases of home deployed projector-camera systems. To this purpose, we conducted an in-situ user study involving 22 diverse households. Several different categories were specified using a grounded theory approach; placement, projection surface, interaction modality and content/use cases. Based on the analysis of our results, we created

UbiBeam

; a projector-camera system designed for domestic use. The system has several different features including automatic focus adjustment with depth sensing which enables ordinary surfaces to be transformed into touch-sensitive information displays. We developed

UbiBeam

as an open source platform and provide construction plans, 3D-models and source code to the community. We encourage researchers to use it as a research platform and conduct more field studies on projector-camera systems.

Diary studies require participants to record entries at the moment of events, but the process often distracts the participants and disrupts the flow of the events. In this work, we explore the notion of

delayed reflection

for diary studies. Users quickly denote cues of diary events and only reflect on the cues later when they are not busy. To minimize disruptions, we employed a squeeze gesture that is swift and discreet for denoting cues. We investigated the feasibility of delayed reflection and compared it against a conventional digital diary that requires users to reflect immediately at the time of entry. In a weeklong field study, we asked participants to record their daily experiences with both types of diaries. Our results show that users’ preference is context-dependent. Delayed reflection is favored for use in contexts when interruptions are deemed inappropriate (e.g. in meetings or lectures) or when the users are mobile (e.g. walking). In contrast, the users prefer immediate reflection when they are alone, such as during leisure and downtime.

Many documents are still printed on paper and their interaction is disconnected from the digital paper representation. Conductive ink allows to print documents with embedded electrical circuits. We developed several layouts to add interactive elements, such as tick boxes or signature fields, to paper documents. In this paper we propose several techniques to enhance classical paper documents by an additional layer of conductive ink. Through this layer the documents maintain their traditional properties and affordances but receive new interactive capabilities that transform them into smart documents. Attached tiny computing elements enable interaction with the paper, such as sensing selections on a form, detecting a signature, or traditional office equipment (e.g. paperclip). Additionally to the layout suggestions we show different ways how the computing unit can be connected to the document and how multi-page documents can be connected to a single computing unit.

Over the past decades, a plethora of innovative ubiquitous computing (ubicomp) systems have been constructed. The acceptance of the systems, however, depends on how users experience them in real contexts. While many of the ubicomp research projects include some form of user study, there is no overview of how user experience (UX) is approached in ubicomp research. To this end, we conducted a systematic literature review of ubicomp UX studies. Our findings reveal that users‘experiences with ubicomp systems have often been investigated in rather lightweight ways, for example by addressing basic usability issues, collecting ratings by simple, predetermined scales, or producing descriptions of general experiences such as fun and trust. Based on the findings we argue that a deeper and more fine-grained understanding of user experience would help developing more successful ubicomp systems. We propose a ubicomp UX framework that can help design and evaluate ubicomp systems with a desirable set of target experiences.

In recent years the presence of displays has become ubiquitous. They range from small-sized screens, such as smartphones or tablets to large screens as they are found in projection screens or public displays. Each display requires a unique modality of interaction, such as a dedicated input device, direct touch or does not provide any interaction at all. With the ubiquity of smartphones people carry with them a high-end interaction device that can connect to any web-connected screen. To allow quick access, we built

uCanvas

(“Ubiquitous Canvas”), a system to engage with interactive surfaces. In contrast to previous work no additional hardware is required, nor do users need to install any proprietary software. Our system runs on all current smartphones equipped with magnetometer and accelerometer, which is used to define a canvas and transmit cursor positions to a server connected to the display. To integrate interactive surfaces into applications, we created a lean Javascript library that allows publishers to specify interaction parameters (such as pointing, clicking, menu selection and text entry) by adding just a few lines of code. We built two example applications to evaluate the feasibility of the system and findings show that (1) interaction is intuitive and (2) easy to set up on the user side.

While screen mirroring is an integral part of many video mediated collaborations, current systems are limited in their ability to include ad hoc screen mirroring from personal devices of collocated participants on each end of a video call. In this paper we introduce a system that addresses this limitation by enabling lightweight multi-user wireless smartphone mirroring within a video call. The system enables multiple smartphones to share both digital content as well as physical artefacts when mirroring the live view from the smartphone camera feed. We present a study of the system in use for a distributed design task. The findings explore how shared access to screen mirroring facilitates a fluid switching of floor control in the meeting and smooth interleaving of individual, sub group and full group shared activities. Further, the findings highlight the importance of smartphone mobility in enabling access to screen mirroring from the sites of individual work and sites of various physical artefacts and the significance of this for the dynamics of a video mediated collaboration.

For visualization developers, the design and construction of effective applications can often feel like a war against screen space. Every now and then, developers are tasked with building a visualization that will live exclusively on a large, high-resolution display. More often than not, however, visualizations must be built to survive across the varying screen sizes of laptops, tablets, and phones. This may explain why many developers have flocked to the web, where stylesheets can easily be swapped and modified to tailor an application’s look and feel to the current screen size. But that

screen

is defiantly singular. If developers want to tap into a more elaborate hardware ecosystem, they must take on the additional workload of server-side or device-specific coding. To this end, we introduce Disperse, a server-based framework that allows developers to encode multi-screen capabilities into web-based visualizations using a simple set of client-side mark-ups. The framework is intended primarily for authoring new visualizations, but can also be used to add multi-screen capabilities to existing visualizations. Disperse not only imposes minimal time and complexity overhead on the development and deployment of these visualizations, as we show through five case studies, but also allows multi-screen visualizations to be realized across any set of web-enabled devices.

In this paper we present the approach of interaction scaling. It assists users during their current tasks by adjusting interactivity depending on the user’s distance to large high-resolution displays. The mapping method of interaction scaling combines the calculation of a distance-adjusted mapping factor with a manual/automatic change of precision levels. In our user study we evaluated how different accuracies, user preferences and physical navigation affect the user performance of distance-aware manipulation techniques. We used symmetric/asymmetric bimanual manipulation techniques that were evaluated with interaction scaling and a direct mapping approach. Further, we differentiated between coarse-grained and fine-grained accuracy of manipulation tasks. The study identified that interaction scaling improves user performance for very precise manipulation tasks. The participants were able to manipulate objects more accurately with asymmetric technique than with symmetric technique. Most participants preferred a manual switching; however, the tasks could be solved equally well with automatic switching by half of them.

Users can interact with large displays in many ways, including touch and mid-air gestures. However, it remains unclear how these ways compare and when users choose one over the other. In a first experiment, we compare touch and mid-air gestures to identify their relative performance for target acquisition. In a second experiment, participants choose freely between touch and mid-air gestures and we artificially require movement to simulate situations where mid-air is considered beneficial. Results from the first experiment show mid-air to be overall slower than touch depending on the task; in the second experiment, participants mostly chose touch in particular for selecting small targets and they rarely switched between mid-air and touch. Results also show that when faced with an increasing cost of using touch in the form of movement, participants chose mid-air over touch; touch remains as fast as mid-air on average.

Research in surface computing has traditionally been driven by technology. A project that explored ways to provide support for professional users in their work with novel technology by focusing on people instead is presented. A co-design approach was applied by systematically involving end users (i.e., industrial designers) throughout the design process. In a series of activities with fifty designers, the creation of mood boards was identified as an important task for them, and studied in depth. The

funky

-

design spaces

vision of a holistic design studio housing interconnected tools that support the creation of mood boards was co-designed, brought to life in two prototypes, and evaluated with designers. The results suggest these environments could stimulate designers to break away from their desks and encourage collaboration with more people.

The recording and sharing of family stories remains an important part of what it means to be a “family”. While there is prior research into supporting storytelling for families living apart, there remains a gap in understanding and supporting family storytelling for migrant workers. To address this gap, we explored how technologies could be designed for domestic helpers. Nine domestic helpers were recruited and divided into three design teams. The participatory design sessions and cultural probe findings led to the design of

Kwento

, a prototype mobile application that uses prompts to encourage helpers to reflect upon their personal experiences.

Traditionally, in participatory design (PD) workshops, pens and paper are often used by participants to provide their design ideas. However, using a software tool to gather their feedback can have certain advantages. While some attempts to develop such tools have been undertaken, the basic question whether the tool-based approach is better or worse than its paper-based counterpart in terms of the quality of feedback gathered is rarely explored. We aim to address this research question by conducting three PD workshops with the paper-based and tool-based approach. In addition to the findings about the comparability of the two approaches, one of our main contributions to the future research on this question is the development of the coding scheme CAt+. It enables systematic comparisons of PD data collected with different methods and aims to support designers and developers to exploit PD results.

This paper presents a project for the social development of ICTs, which used a participatory design approach and sought to have a high social impact on a community of craftswomen (embroiderers from Cartago, Colombia). Participating in this project implied active dialogue with the community to recognize the knowledge of each participant and achieve culturally relevant representations materialized in technological artifacts. We posit dialogue, representation and recognition as key elements for developing successful participatory design. In practice, this was achieved through an iterative, incremental and open-ended methodology, whose main feature was engagement by doing. This process of design allowed engineers to recognize the craftswomen’s traditional knowledge and allowed craftswomen to be less afraid of technology. The main resultant artifact was a tangible user interface that facilitates dialogue between fashion designers and embroiderers in the process of designing new embroidery patterns. This and other artifacts that emerged from the activities and dialogues, the level of engagement of the participants, and the convergence points discovered between embroidery and technology, lead us to conclude that the process presented here can be replicated with other craft communities, to reinforce these communities and assist them in generating innovation in their processes and products.

This paper presents a systematical comparison of pointing gestures in the context of controlling home appliances in smart homes. The pointing gestures were conducted with head, hand, arm and a computer mouse serving as baseline. To the best of our knowledge, we are the first to report on such a systematical comparison of the mentioned modalities. Our results indicate that although being overall slower and more inaccurate than hand and arm gestures, head gestures are more suitable for mid air input than previous research indicated. We show that disadvantages like slowness and inaccuracy can be compensated by a larger target size. In addition, head gestures have the largest learning effect. Considering our results and the possibilities head gestures would provide in daily life, we recommend thinking of head gestures as a feasible input modality besides hand and arm gestures.

The mobile versions of services such as Google Maps or Open Street Maps allow the exploration of maps on smartphones and tablets. The gestures used are the pinch to adjust the zoom level and the drag/flick to move the map. In this paper, two new gestures to adjust the zoom level of maps (but also of images and documents) are presented. Both gestures – with slight differences – allow the identification of a target area to zoom, which is enlarged automatically up to cover the whole map container. The proposed gestures are added to the traditional ones (drag, pinch and flick) without any overlap. Therefore, users do not need to change their regular practices. They have just two more options to control the zoom level. One of the most relevant and appreciated advantages has to do with the gesture for smartphones (Tap&Tap): this allows users to control the zoom level with just one hand. The traditional pinch gesture, instead, needs two hands. According to the test results on the new gestures in comparison with the traditional pinch, 30 % of time is saved on tablets (Two-Finger-Tap gesture) whereas 14 % on smartphones (Tap&Tap gesture).

Quantitative user models such as CLC, Isokoski’s and KLM have been used to estimate the production time of mouse and pen interactions (pointing, clicking, selecting, drawing, writing). In this paper, we assess if these models can be adapted to estimate the production time of touchless hand gestures (air figures of letters and numbers). New parameters were added to the existing models with empirical values drawn from experiments with users. Two metrics were used to evaluate model quality: strength of the relationship between estimated and observed times, and percentage root mean square error. The obtained results support the hypothesis that CLC, Isokoski’s and KLM can be adapted to touchless hand gestures. The paper contributes with model modifications and parameters required to estimate the production times of touchless hand gestures.

Gaze has been proposed as an ideal modality for supporting remote target selection. We explored the potential of integrating gaze with hand gestures for remote interaction on a large display in terms of user experience and preference. We conducted a lab study to compare interaction in a photo-sorting task using gesture only, or the combination of gaze plus gesture. Results from the study show that a combination of gaze and gesture input can lead to significantly faster selection, reduced hand fatigue and increased ease of use compared to using only hand input. People largely preferred the combination of gaze for target selection and hand gestures for manipulation. However, gaze can cause particular kinds of errors and can induce a cost due to switching modalities.

We present a public-display-and-mobile-based digital art installation named WishBoard that translates the essence of a chalk-and-wall based art installation called ‘Before I Die’ into a technological communal expression. Our studies show that public sharing of personal wishes leverage the connection inside a community, creating a feeling of neutral ground for gathering, giving a sense of third place independent of physical constrains, named thirdplaceness. The installation allows people to freely express their wishes, with certain personalization, and provides a public visualization of all shared wishes promoting face-to-face conversations. We conducted two deployments using our installation in a ‘socially abandoned’ space. Analyzing the shared wishes content and people’s behavior when observing the wishes popping up on the public displays, we were able to notice the essential role that public displays combined to mobile devices interaction can play in creating a community meeting place when providing a way for self-expression.

Media architecture has emerged as a relevant field of study within HCI since its inception at the turn of the century. While media architecture has the potential to radically affect the social space into which it is introduced, much research in the field was initially carried out through experimental installations in public spaces, often with higher emphasis on examining the properties of this novel type of interface, rather than examining the impact it had on the social context. In this paper, we look back at the field and analyze interactive urban media architecture covering a period of fifteen years of practice with a particular emphasis on how installations have influenced modes and patterns of social behaviour. We classify nine representative installations according to their physical layout, interaction strategies and types of interface. We focus on how these installations were perceived and used by their respective audiences and outline six modes of social interaction that unfold with these installations. From this analysis, we derive seven social interaction patterns, which represent different strategies for designing and employing media architecture to influence social interaction.

The Disney method is a collaborative creativity technique that uses three roles - dreamer, realist and critic - to facilitate the consideration of different perspectives on a topic. Especially for novices it is important to obtain guidance in applying this method. One way is providing groups with a trained moderator. However, feedback about the group’s behavior might interrupt the flow of the idea finding process. We built and evaluated a system that provides ambient feedback to a group about the distribution of their statements among the three roles. Our preliminary field study indicates that groups supported by the system contribute more and roles are used in a more balanced way while the visualization does not disrupt the group work.

Virtual meetings have become increasingly common with modern video-conference and collaborative software. While they allow obvious savings in time and resources, current technologies add unproductive layers of protocol to the flow of communication between participants, rendering the interactions far from seamless. In this work we introduce Remote Proxemics, an extension of proxemics aimed at bringing the syntax of co-located proximal interactions to virtual meetings. We propose Eery Space, a shared virtual locus that results from merging multiple remote areas, where meeting participants’ are located side-by-side as if they shared the same physical location. Eery Space promotes collaborative content creation and seamless mediation of communication channels based on virtual proximity. Results from user evaluation suggest that our approach is sufficient to initiate proximal exchanges regardless of their geolocation, while promoting smooth interactions between local and remote people alike.