Design, User Experience, and Usability: Design Discourse

The current state of knowledge of our lived world is in constant confrontation of two environments that does not yet fully converge. On the one hand stands a person with his or her own cultural traditions and historical development, and on the other hand stands the technology per se, in its relatively rapid development phase. These two parts constantly roam without bringing us a significant breakthrough in knowledge, which is the needed human cognitive reference point when interacting with computers. Our aim is to find out certain nodes of understanding between these two worlds, and propose a hypothesis for their possible approximation.

Design thinking (DT) is regarded as a system of three overlapping spaces—viability, desirability, and feasibility—where innovation increases when all three perspectives are addressed. Understanding how innovation within teams can be supported by DT methods and tools captivates the interest of business communities. This paper aims to examine how DT methods and tools foster innovation in teams. A case study approach, based on two workshops, examined three DT methods with a software tool. The findings support the use of DT methods and tools as a way of incubating ideas and creating innovative solutions within teams when team collaboration and software limitations are balanced. The paper proposes guidelines for utilizing DT methods and tools in innovation projects.

As a type of symbol, there are four dimensions in icons’ symbolic interpretation, namely semantic, syntactic, contextual and pragmatic dimension. Among those dimensions, semantic dimension is the most important one in user’s cognitive analysis. Based on the representation of semantics, icons can be classified into four types, namely function-metaphor, operation-metaphor, object-metaphor and meaning-metaphor icon. Here we conducted behavioral experiment and eye-tracking experiment to evaluate those four types of icons selected from military aeronautical system. The behavioral experiment showed that subjects have lowest reaction time to function-metaphor icons and highest accuracy to identify object-metaphor icons. The eye-tracking system showed that subjects have the most fixations when searching for object-metaphor icons and the least fixations when searching for function-metaphor icons. Our research is the first endeavor into the investigation of human’s response to different types of icons in the military systems and thus provided novel and valuable guidance to the design of icons in those systems.

This paper reports on the insights gained from introducing Design Thinking into the final year of a UK university course where students created positive behavior change interventions. The rationale for course design and teaching process is outlined, with a discussion of design as an engineering process versus an innovation process. The students followed Stanford University’s d.school 5-step approach of Empathize-Define-Ideate-Prototype-Test, and their journey is described in detail. We observed that initially students found the Design Thinking approach counter-intuitive and confusing, yet on further progress they recognized the strengths and opportunities it offers. On the whole, students reflected positively on their learning and the re-evaluation of their role as a designer of digital artefacts. Lessons learned from a teaching point of view are outlined, the most poignant being the realization that it was required to ‘un-teach’ certain design practices students had come to adopt, in particular the view of design as a self-inspired process where users are consulted for feedback but not as a source for innovation.

HCI’s success as a discipline is based on its ability of dealing with the problems, desires, and requirements of technology users. Through its turn to user experience, the community was able to create products whose use is pleasant and exciting. There are, however, design contexts where the corresponding focus on fostering use might be in need of a complementing perspective.

During the last couple of years, the topic of technology

non-use

has appeared within the scope of HCI. Within this text, we will explore how these recent conceptualisations and analyses can be employed in order to turn non-use into a design resource. We do so by discussing them in the context of a concrete development project aimed at creating interactive technology for exhibition contexts.

In design practice, we will meet with various target conflict and challenges. On most of the times, compromising is usually used to solve the conflict. However, in this paper we are trying to solve it by making win-win design solution other than making compromise. This can help satisfy different needs and still target to have outstanding user experience. In order to make no compromise design solution, a new thinking process will be introduced—the evaporating cloud of the theory of constraint to resolve the conflict during the design practice. The results obtained in this paper include a new approach to thinking method in design practice. The impacts of our obtained results are reducing the prejudice towards compromise in design practice and make people believe win-win solution existing on the complicated design practice. This thinking method can also be permeated into a wide range of detail design practice.

The use of our body language to communicate with computer systems is an increasingly possible and applicable feature in the real world. This fact is intensified by the evolution of gesture recognition based commercial solutions. A gesture interface complements or replaces navigation in a conventional interface, it is up to each developer to choose the most appropriate option for their application. When opting for gesture usage, the gestures will be responsible to activate the systems functions. This work presents a gesture development process that can be used to aid the construction of gesture interfaces. The process here described, should help interface designers to incorporate gesture-based natural interaction into their applications in a more systematic way. To illustrate the Process, gestures for the actions “Select”, “Rotate”, “Translate”, “Scale” and “Stop” were developed.

Catchwords such as “Cyber-Physical-Systems” and “Industry 4.0” describe the current development of systems with embedded intelligence. These systems can be characterized by an increasing technical complexity that must be addressed in the user interface. In this paper we analyze the specific requirements posed by the interaction with cyber-physical-systems, present a coordinated approach to these requirements and illustrate our approach with a practical example of an assistance system for assembly workers in an industrial production environment.

This conference paper discusses the theoretical landscape of service design. It will illustrate how service design is situated in a discourse on design research and outline the theoretical background of this multidisciplinary approach from a constructive and generative research perspective. In this paper, the foundation for the conceptual service design framework is based on current debates in the field. Identification of the conceptual framework is based on an analysis of co-creating service design cases that were implemented at the Service Innovation Corner (SINCO) laboratory at the Faculty of Art and Design, University of Lapland. The conceptual framework presents five themes that are closely connected with service design: (1) design research, (2) value co-creation, (3) user experience, (4) learning, and (5) citizen engagement. Using the perspective of service design, this paper attempts to elucidate the effects of service design on development and innovation processes in private and public sectors.

Interactive Voice Response Systems (IVRS) are popular voice-based systems to access information over the telephone. In developing regions, HCI researchers have shown keen interest in IVRS due to high affordability and reach among rural, poor, and illiterate users. However, IVRS are also notorious for their usability issues. This makes researchers thrive for more usable IVRS. The lack of automated usability testing tools for voice-based systems makes researchers depend on human subjects for testing their proposed IVR systems that are both costly and time-consuming. To address this research gap, we present Maareech, a usability testing tool for voice response systems using XML-based user models. Maareech has a flexible architecture to accommodate different user models that can be used to perform usability tests. In this paper, we discuss Maareech’s architecture and its ability to mimic IVR user behavior based on different user models.

The World Wide Web has shortened the distances between people but it is still hard to find a general user interface for all the users. Because people living in different areas of the world have different cultures, religions, and traditions. Designing a user interface according to the culture of the user is important. Different minds have different views about cultural effects in user interface. This paper presents a detailed review on the recent work and research in cultural effects on metaphor design. This paper also explores the problems and issues regarding localizing metaphors in different cultures.

This paper presents the preferences of selected UI components of Chinese users. The areas of study were chosen using from a semiotic perspective, which lead us to focus on the cultural context, as well as the linguistic structure of user interaction. This quantitative study based on 50 respondents was targeted at validating the data gathered in a qualitative pilot study. The results are presented as UI design guidelines to simplify their adoption by both HCI researchers, and UX practitioners.

This paper presents how combining principles of user experience, traditional usability and industry design and development guidelines can impact the user knowledge elicitation process. The main objective is to provide an alternative for practitioners and researchers who seek up to date frameworks to evaluate contemporary digital artifacts. These advances generated better results on that matter and elevated an opportunity of a new usability testing, much more adequate in the established context.

Heuristic evaluation, also known as discounted usability engineering method, is a quick and very effective form of usability testing performed typically by usability experts or domain experts. However, in the field of gestural interaction testing, general-purpose usability heuristic framework may not be sufficient to evaluate the usability validity of gestures used. Gestural interaction could be found in products from mainstream touchscreen devices to emerging technologies such as motion tracking, augmented virtual reality, and holograms. Usability testing by experts during the early stages of product development that utilizes emerging technologies of gestural interaction is desirable. Therefore, this study has the objective to create a set of gesture heuristics that can be used in conjunction and with minimal conflict with existing general-purpose usability heuristics for the purpose of designing and testing new gestural interaction. In order to do so, this study reviews literature of gestural interaction and usability testing to find and evaluate previous gesture heuristics. The result is a condensed set of four gesture-specific heuristics comprising Learnability, Cognitive Workload, Adaptability and Ergonomics. Paired sample t-test analysis revealed that significantly more defects were discovered when gesture heuristics knowledge were used for evaluation of gestural interaction.

This paper describes a community co-design approach performed in rural Mozambique. It discusses the experiences and experiments performed in a community multimedia center towards creating services with inherent values for daily community activities. The design approach pursues a holistic interpretation of community needs, and discusses emerging, new and creative applications for future community binding.

Based on the experience of developing a mobile app, this paper discusses the prototyping and testing cycles not as final steps of a design process, but as a methodology to be used from the beginning to the end of a project. On the project described in this paper, prototyping was not a tool used only to test the final product, but it was present throughout the design process.

This paper presents usability tests results with real users during the prototype development phase of two applications for seniors care, AALFred and SmartCompanion. To this aim, usability testing was performed considering a Living Lab approach. Seniors were invited to use the applications in an environment that simulates the one they would use the tested technology during their everyday life. Observation methods, thinking aloud and questionnaires were used to collect data related to the systems’ effectiveness and users’ satisfaction, namely their expectations, frustrations and difficulties. Evaluations were performed during the initial phases of product development and results were used to improve the applications, considering the development cycle of User-Centered Design methodology.

A successful product provides a pleasurable and straightforward experience. This leads to an increasing importance of the human-computer interaction and user experience issues in design. Despite the wealth of methods and tools available to support the design process, these are frequently incomplete and difficult to use. This research contributes to fill this gap by investigating the possible synergies between two design methods, the BadIdeas method (BI) and the Interaction Design Integrated Method (IDIM). BI is an early design method especially suited for the ideation phase of the design process. IDIM deals with design, evaluation, and innovation forecasting, and covers the first part of the product development process. Two limitations are highlighted in each of these methods and their concepts and tools are mutually exploited to improve the other. Suggestions for integration and improvement are presented with examples that demonstrate the benefits of this research.

Television commerce represents a significant opportunity for worldwide market due to the digital TV transition in several countries. In order to provide a design guidance for these applications, we developed a T-commerce Posture HCI Design Pattern based on user experience research. Three focus groups are composed of twenty-five participants and an experiment with eight volunteers were performed. The results are described as a design pattern template composed of four types of t-commerce applications. Each type presents a recurrent problem, a proven solution and a context. The developed design pattern helps designers to decide the t-commerce main interactions focusing on better user experience.

The UMUX-LITE is a two-item questionnaire that assesses perceived usability. In previous research it correlated highly with the System Usability Scale (SUS) and, with appropriate adjustment using a regression formula, had close correspondence to the magnitude of SUS scores, enabling its comparison with emerging SUS norms. Those results, however, were based on the data used to compute the regression formula. In this paper we describe a study conducted to investigate the quality of the published formula using independent data. The formula worked well. As expected, the correlation between the SUS and UMUX-LITE was significant and substantial, and the overall mean difference between their scores was just 1.1, about 1 % of the range of values the questionnaires can take, verifying the efficacy of the regression formula.

A widely used method to measure the level of usability of software applications is the heuristic evaluation. In this method, specialists commonly use the Nielsen’s heuristics to assess the usability of a software product. However, these principles address to general aspects and become inappropriate when they are used to evaluate new categories of software applications. For this reason, we previously proposed a new set of usability heuristics in the Web transactional domain. In this paper, we present an empirical analysis of our new proposal. For this purpose, fifteen undergraduate students were asked to perform a heuristic evaluation in which the new set of heuristics were employed. A survey was taken in order to capture their perceptions about the heuristics in four dimensions: ease of use, usefulness, intention to use and completeness. The results showed that the new heuristics meet the expectations. In addition, this analysis was compared with the results of a similar study that was performed to the current proposal of Nielsen. The results from this study have allowed to reach promising results in this area.

Several studies are being conducted on understanding users’ behavior when using the product to analyze if the behavior that users claim to have or to demonstrate is similar to what they are actually doing at the time of the survey. Against this background, this study sets out to examine the usability of the Emotiv EPOC apparatus using heuristic analysis to detect possible problems involved in the interaction between the product and individual users.

Human – Computer Interaction (HCI) should be a basic part of the formative process of all computer science professionals. Usability and User Experience (UX) were (re)defined by many authors and well recognized standards. UX is usually considered as an extension of usability. To move from usability to UX seems to be a tendency lately. Forming usability/UX evaluators is a challenging task. Practice is usually more appealing and persuasive than theory. The paper presents a study on the perception of (novice) evaluators over generic and specific usability heuristics.

User-centered design in varying domains and contexts defines the daily routine of (external) usability consultants. Understanding users, their tasks and goals is essential for a successful project. This can be quite challenging, especially in more complex domains. Documenting design decisions and solutions provides a sound basis for efficient and sustainable further development by reusing design knowledge and artifacts.

Explicit user testing tends to be costly and time-consuming from a company’s point of view. Therefore, it would be desirable to infer a quantitative usability score directly from implicit feedback, i.e., the interactions of users with a web interface. As a basis for this, we require an adequate usability instrument whose items form a usability score and can be meaningfully correlated with such interactions. Thus, we present

Inuit

, the first instrument consisting of only seven items that have the right level of abstraction to directly reflect user behavior on the client. It has been designed in a two-step process involving usability guideline reviews and expert interviews. A confirmatory factor analysis shows that our model reasonably well reflects real-world perceptions of usability.

Usability problems and related redesign recommendations are the main outcome of usability tests although both are questioned in terms of impact in the design process. Problem classifications aim to provide better feedback for designers by improving usability problem identification, analysis and reporting. However, within the classifications, quite little is discussed about the types and the contents of usability problems as well as the types of required design efforts. We address this problem by scrutinizing the findings of three empirical usability tests conducted in software development projects. As a result, 173 problems were classified into 11 categories. Specific focus was placed on the distinction between the utility and usability types of problems, in order to define the correct development phase and method to fix the problem. The number of utility problems varied from 51 % to 74 %, which shows that early usability testing with a think-aloud protocol and an open task structure measure both utility and usability equally well.

The trend of big data implies novel opportunities and challenges for improving supply chain management. In particular, supply chain risk management can largely benefit from big data technologies and analytic methods for collecting, analyzing, and monitoring both supply chain internal data and environmental data. Due to the increasing complexity, particular attention must not only be put on the processing and analysis of data, but also on the interaction between big data information systems and users. In this paper, we analyze the role of big data in supply chains and present a novel framework of a supply chain risk management system for improving supply chain planning and supply chain risk management under stochastic environments by using big data technologies and analytics. The process-oriented framework serves as a guideline to integrate and analyze big data as well as to implement a respective supply chain risk management system. As such, this paper provides a novel direction of utilizing big data in supply chain risk management.

Today many conferences invite human-computer interaction and usability professionals for presentations, discussions and networking. Dedicated conference websites offer general information on the conference, on the submission process as well as on practical aspects of attending the conference. Considering the domain expertise of the audience, these websites should have extraordinary usability and offer a formidable user experience (UX). In order to evaluate this hypothesis, we have conducted a comparative usability study of three international conference websites with novice and expert users. The results show that previous experience has a slight influence on task efficiency, but also that the findings vary strongly from site to site. Independently from their experience, all participants rated the websites’ overall usability moderate to low.

The emergence of positive User Experience (UX) is gaining in importance for convincing and satisfying customers with technical products. Yet, User Experience Design (UXD) is a rather young discipline within product development. Methods are not well established and traditional aspects predominate. On the other hand, other disciplines are traditionally focused on creating experiences (e.g. sports, film, gaming, etc.). The paper sets out a roadmap for transferring practices and insights from experience focused industries to User Experience Design. Analyzing these experience oriented areas, we suggest supporting UXD in three categories. Requirements for UX are derived studying experiences in other fields. Approaches how these experiences are designed enhance the process on the way to the final experience product. Analysis of persons that take part in the development of experiences in other disciplines can help defining roles to be introduced into product development.

Only in a few years, P2P lending prospered in China, with the annual growth rate over 300 %. But in China, the extension and innovation of P2P industry is not mature yet. Especially, there is little innovation attempting from the lender-side. This paper studies on the macro, industry and micro level to investigate the Chinese lender’s preference and its causes and try to dig out the opportunities in the market. On this basis, this paper gives out a typical lender’s model in P2P in China. The results are worthwhile for related practitioners to innovate new financing products for lenders in China.

Twenty years ago, Liffick [

38

] explored 10 characteristics of computer technology that contributed to their impact on societal issues of that era. The purpose of this exploration was to “anticipate the social consequences of a new product and mitigate any potential negative effects it may have on society.” Furthermore, “the intent of developing a list of these characteristics is that it could lead to a better understanding of the nature of the social impact of computers. In this way, it might be possible to examine a new computer project at the time of its design … to determine its potential impacts as a social change agent”. The purpose of this current paper is to review the characteristics originally proposed to determine whether they are more or less relevant, given the enormous changes in computer technology (CT) in the last 20 years.

UX design and UX research play an important role in startups and their projects. The expressive growth of startups around the world encouraged the Rio de Janeiro State government to foment entrepreneur culture in the city in an attempt of transforming Rio de Janeiro in a digital technology center of reference and created the Startup Rio to encourage startups’ growth in the city. This paper presents the launchpad method used around the world as well as the experience and results collected during UX mentorship on the 5-day Google event (startup launchpad) with 50 startups in Rio de Janeiro, showing the close connection between startup culture and user experience.

The NI© Needs Innovation Model is a structured customized approach for product and service development.

This paper describes a project management model named Converge, that combines Agile, Lean Startup and Design Thinking with the aim of producing user-centered software and sustainable innovation through empathy with users. The model is based on previous works combining the aforementioned methodologies and adjusted considering needs that arose from teams inside the lab, observed empirically. In order to test the method’s validity in a real project, an undergraduate team part of an experimentation lab followed the proposed model to guide the development of a homonymous data storage app.

The app was built in 8 weeks and, at the time of release, 80 % of testers considered it a better solution compared to ones they already used. Overall test results suggest that it is productive to combine the methodologies. The model met its aim since it guided the development of a novel software solution highly regarded by users.

Nowadays, Agile Methodologies are widely used and accepted among software development teams. These methodologies allow speeding up the development process while permitting less documentation and more flexible processes. Moreover, Usability is a measure of software quality and has become more important with the changes that users have experienced. This paper aims to answer how usability and agile methodologies have been integrated into the various stages of software development through a systematic review.

For ICT product, the importance of the functional property of a product speaks for itself. However, as an important method of defining the product differentiation, the influence of product appearance on that whether the product property can be perceived correctly. As the engineer of human-computer cooperative relationship in product location, if the product appearance can’t provide service for the macro planning and strategy made by an enterprise to the company, it will brings negative effect on the healthy development of the product system. The paper tries to provide a method to help enterprises to evaluate the appearance design scheme before putting the product into production to check the matching degree with the product planning. Then the product appearance design will conform to the product strategy of an enterprise. The evaluation method uses physical projection method to obtain the user cognitive image data about product appearance from the user end. Then using the Correspondent Analysis method, the perpetual method shows analysis result. Finally, according to the overall analysis of product system, it forms the evaluation of the new product appearance. The research shows that there are defects in the company’s product system planning. And these mainly are similar perceptual location, without characteristics, inconsistency of user end cognition of appearance result with the designed definition, hard to attract the consumers’ and users’ interests.

This paper describes an eco-driving feedback system, OBDEnergy. Twenty-six drivers described their understanding of environmental impacts of driving before and after using OBDEnergy. Before OBDEnergy, participants discussed impacts in abstract, global terms (pollution, global warming). After OBDEnergy, participants appealed to concrete reference points (gallons of gas, trees required) with calculations and comparisons. We conclude that user-centered eco-driving feedback can contribute to pro-environmental behavior via increased awareness of the concrete environmental impacts of driving.

The emotional dimension of users of information and communications technologies (ICT) is a key aspect in user experience (UX), as designers’ main objective is to ensure users are happy (satisfied, engaged) with their interaction designs. However, current UX design methods focus on ensuring that efficacy (success achieving a specific task) and efficiency (in the fastest, best way possible) are successfully achieved. The satisfaction of the user is evaluated at the end of the process, and evaluated in reference to the efficacy and efficiency of their experience. In this paper, the author presents a new approach (Emotion-Centered-Design, or ECD) in which the key to successful interaction design (happy users) is brought about by placing emotions at the center of the design process, versus doing so at the end. By doing so, designers can deliver more significant experiences, increase user experience satisfaction, and identify new ways to innovate in interaction design, as well as add more value to users.

The study of rhetoric evolved from focusing solely on discourse, in Ancient Greece, to the inclusion of audiovisual elements in the 20th century. Today, a ubiquitously digital world opens a new field of research, which might be called “rhetoric of interaction”. The purpose of this work is to explore rhetorical possibilities of interactive features, that is, how different interactive design solutions may influence the apprehension of messages and help the building of arguments. Based on Aristotelian concepts of classical rhetoric, this study concentrates on the presence of the appeal of pathos, that is, an appeal to the emotions of visitors, with analyses of three websites: “Pablo the Flamingo”, “World Under Water”, and “Sortie en Mer”.

This work proposes the use of a system to perform emotions logging in automated usability tests for mobile devices. Our goal is to efficiently, easily and cost-effectively assess the users’ affective state by evaluating their expressive reactions during a mobile software usability evaluation process. These reactions are collected using the front camera on mobile devices. The analysis of three different emotions - happiness, surprise and anger– and two “emotional events” – spontaneous smile and gazing away from screen –performed through server software. This automated test generates a graphical log report, timing (a) current application page (b) user events e.g. tap (c) emotions levels e.g. level of happiness and finally (d) emotional events e.g. smiling or looking away from screen.

Motivating behavior change for energy reduction using technological solutions has led to the development of hundreds of technological products in less than a decade. Technology design in the energy reduction field is often characterized by two perspectives; “build and they will come” and “begin with human need, motivation, and desire.” Using a human centered design perspective – we experimentally evaluated the role of three personality specific motivations, in the usability and behavior change intentions of three motivationally frame energy reduction applications. We found significant usability effects with both the affective and sociability technology have greater usability. There we no difference between technologies on behavioral measures and no interactions of outcomes with personality measures. However, both NFA and NFC have independent effects on differing behavioral outcomes. Discussion called for more research on the role of personality and motivationally framed technologies along with larger samples, and longer times between pre and post assessments.

The use of clothing as a vehicle for communication is as old as the garment itself. Over the last few centuries the signaling function of dress has declined into the symbolic and anonymous. Increasing privatization of society, has led to nearly half of its population suffering from debilitating loneliness. Positioned within Positive Computing, this paper examines the possibilities of non screen-based digital personal artifacts, in the form of Soft User Interfaces, to enhance social dynamics. This paper provides a case study on the use of non-verbal signaling as the foundation for soft computation deployed in the public sphere. The proposed technology is aimed at strengthening social capital, by freeing up situated user attention and facilitate the formation of wearable networks upon establishment of mutual sympathy during chance encounters in public space.

A growing number of video games utilize structural and expressive methods to implement music dramaturgy ‘dynamically’ into a non-linear and immersive format. Nevertheless little is known about these musically supported immersive experiences and their processing at the user end. Accordingly, this paper studies the effects of dynamic music on attention allocation and subsequent cognitive-emotional involvement. Self-report data is presented from 60 subjects playing an action-adventure in dynamic as well as static music conditions with low and high arousal expression. The dynamic condition systematically affected imaginary components of immersive experience. Design recommendations for flow and self-location are given with regards to task context and regulatory effects of emotion experience.

In this paper, we report our findings charting the user interfaces (UI) design trends of current mobile phone wellness applications (n = 39), and report e.g. that whereas features related to sharing are already quite common, conversational UIs and gamification still play a minor role. In addition, we present the service design based development of future concepts for ubiquitous wellness services and UIs, and evaluate the concepts in an online survey based user study with 89 participants. The salient findings show that concepts that were embedded into everyday life routines and which contained clearly presented interpretation of the data were the most appreciated.

Netflix and Hulu are examples of HTTP-based Adaptive Streaming (HAS). HAS is unique because it attempts to manage the user’s perceived quality by adapting video quality. Current HAS research fails to address whether adaptations actually make a difference? The main challenge in answering this is the lack of consideration for the end user’s perceived quality. The research community is converging on an accepted set of ‘component metrics’ for HAS. However, determining an objective Quality of Experience (QoE) estimate is an open issue. A between-subject user study of Netflix was conducted to shed light on the user’s perception of quality. We found that users prefer to receive lower video quality levels first with marginal improvements made over time. Currently, content providers switch between the highest and lowest level of quality. This paper seeks to explain a better method that led to higher user satisfaction based on Mean opinion score values (MOS).

Many people use physical activity tracking products to gather personal behavioral data, make better decisions, and make changes to their behavior. While the proliferation of new products on the market makes collecting personal data easier, how to help people engage with these products over a long period of time remains an open question. To uncover which features of physical activity tracking products lead to engaging experience, we conducted a study with people who use physical activity tracking products to support or track behavior change. We conducted baseline interviews and had participants interact with either a BodyMedia armband or a FitBit activity tracker. Participants rated their experience with the product daily for a period of four weeks and reflected on their engagement at the end of the study. Through synthesis and analysis of the study findings, we draw out four characteristics for engaging experience in physical activity tracking product use:

connectivity, curiosity, personalization, and motivation

.

As human skills of creating and crafting improved rapidly, human and material civilization has developed, thus the man-made objects become the record of the development of human capacity of creating. The museum is an institution that demonstrates such a process. We propose the concept of a novel personal museum in this paper. Different from a traditional museum, a personal museum not only shows personal belongings but also combines personal experiences and emotions with the objects. Apart from time dimension of life, other dimensions of life will be kept in the personal museum forever, thus each person will feel his or her existence and value in the world through this personal museum. The paper contains introduction, methodology, design and insights from user study under this research topic.

The author’s firm undertook the Marriage Machine project aimed to persuade couples to open themselves up towards techniques of daily practice and interaction with their partners, with the objective of making their relationships with each other deeper, more enjoyable, more personally enriching, and educational. In a user-centered design process, we planned, researched, analyzed, designed, implemented (sample screens), evaluated, documented, and prepared training documents for a mobile phone application conceptual prototype. The Marriage Machine combines marriage/bonding theories with information design/visualization and persuasion design. This paper explains the development of the Marriage Machine’s user-experience design. A more complete description appears in [

22

].

The emotional stability and physical health of workers on board aircraft are faced with the factors and conditions that enable professionals to carry out their activities and develop normally, despite the fact that these conditions may present themselves to professionals in adverse conditions [

1

]. The modern history of aviation with its great technological complexity has pilots as redundant components that integrate embedded controls in modern aircraft. This leads us to say that the value of the worker as a permanent social group in society does not receive, currently, the proper priority. In research on the health of the pilot, there are three major perspectives that have been investigated that influence his stability, as well as the mental and emotional development of the modern airline pilot [

2

]: The previous life of the individual directly tied to experience, age, genetic and physiological vectors, The social environment, cultural environment and formal education leading to the final result, manifested by the ability, personality, strength and character and The verifiable standards of quality and quantity of life desired, ambition and achievements and its effects.

This article presents the design process behind the specification of a behaviour change intervention method to promote energy saving. The amount of energy used for food preparation is highly influenced by people’s behaviours. A user-centred design approach based on scenario analysis was applied to provide understanding of context of use and specification of user requirements. This knowledge was applied to the design of behaviour change interventions to motivate sustainable behaviours.

Encouraging people to make sustainable transport choices remains a global challenge and many interventions have been attempted. This study investigated the reflection on own/others’ subjective experiences (SE) as an intervention using a smartphone application as the intervention tool. Participants were car drivers and used the app to automatically capture and reflect on their commute journeys and experiences. The experimental group were also able to reflect upon others’ experiences across car, walk and cycle modes. Others’ experiences were designed based on a previous self-report study. Results of the study showed that quantitative measures of intentions to change were not affected by the intervention but that qualitative data showed that the positive experience of the active transport modes did bring about reflection on behaviour and a potential influence on opinions and intentions which warrants further study.

Nowadays, a successful product should not only possess enhanced aesthetic quality and smart functionality, it should also satisfy consumers via the emotions they derive from using the product. Biomimetic designs are broadly used in product design to emphasize emotional interaction. Therefore, understanding the psychological effects of biomimetic products is becoming an important issue in the development of products with strong affective qualities. Adopting a cognitive-emotional approach, this study explored the emotions evoked in consumers by biomimetic products. This included an investigation of the following three hypotheses: (1) Consumers’ emotions can be influenced by products with biomimetic features; (2) The emotions evoked in consumers by concrete biomimetic features (i.e., human contours, facial shapes and plant shapes) are greater than those evoked by less concrete features. The results indicated that consumers have different degrees of emotional responses to products exhibiting different levels of biomimicry. Furthermore, the results also showed that consumers had different degrees of emotional responses to different types of biomimetic products. Additional results are also discussed in the paper.

To study the difference of users’ emotion experience between skeuomorphism and flat design, based on kansei engineering, cognitive psychology and human factors theory, we conducted a semantic differential (SD) experimental study in car navigation interface. The independent variables in this study was the visual representation method (VRM). The dependent variable were user experience rating (UER) and artificial texture rating (ATR). The main findings of this study are as follows: (1) we find that the users’ emotion experience is mainly made up of stylization cognition factor (SCF), emotional cognitive factor (ECF) and the decorative cognitive factor (DCC); (2) The artificial texture rating (ATR) has a significant effect on user experience rating (UER). The research results can help designers to deeply understand the difference of user emotional impact between skeuomorphism and flat design, which could guide the designers better to design the car navigation interface.

The paper analyses the role of navigation in children’s appbooks interactive visual narrative. It is based on design categories for picture books analysis, proposed by Sophie Van der Linden [

1

], and on categories proposed by Janet Murray for interactive narrative analysis [

2

]. Linden explains how the structure of printed book articulates narrative, and Murray describes the aesthetic effects of digital narrative. User’s active participation in the story unfolding, as also hypertext nonlinearity, extends children’s appbooks design dimensions, inserting navigation as a relevant feature for the user experience. The navigation design has been analyzed in four appbooks, namely:

Jack and the Beanstalk, Monster’s Socks, Petting Zoo

and

The Very Cranky Bear

.

Human-Robot interaction is a field seeing massive growth, and as robots gain more and more capabilities they will play an increasingly prominent part in our everyday lives. But, as robotic development continues to grow, one subfield of robotics research is lagging behind other areas: roboethics or ensuring that robot behavior adheres to certain moral standards. This paper explores robot ethics through the lens of some popular sci-fi movies involving robots as characters in their storyline. Different ethical issues related to human-robot interaction are cast and discussed. To overcome those issues, a survey was conducted to detect everyone’s duty. Its results and implications are presented and may be of benefit to HRI researchers.

Interactive digital television is at early stage as regards the interface design, especially in business transactions (t-commerce). Current attempts to transpose the problem related to linearity of narrative and temporal flows and audiovisual content obstruction by the interactive layer, although pointing out design perspectives - in addition to the structural and visual web patterns - are still insufficient as regards the design of interfaces connected and converged for t-commerce applications. This article considers these problems arise from the structural basis that support television scripts and streamings. In this sense, this article proposes the hybridization between the linear model, inherited from analogue condition, and nonlinear model, intrinsic to digital media, as a methodological strategy aiming to strength the creation of interactive audiovisual content connected and convergent for this context.

Scenario-based methods, like the scenario-, storytelling- and storyboarding-techniques, are broadly used in the context of user experience design. Practitioners cannot yet fully appreciate the benefits of scenario-based methods, because of the uncertainty that is often linked with the corresponding decision-making processes. This work aims at introducing a methodological proceeding for supporting the evaluation of use scenarios and stories, consisting of three modules. A checklist supports the initial assessment of scenarios by their creator, a questionnaire helps to identify if the content of scenarios represents the intended user experience, while a comparison-based method enables the association of possible media to visualize a scenario in the most appropriate way. Those findings ground on a literature study and exemplary application of the support. Increasing traceability of scenarios through a systematical assessment and a selection support would encourage usage of scenario-based methods and increase their acceptance.

The interactive narratives for developing interactive & educational documentaries have served for developing interactive installations & products in galleries, exhibitions, museums, universities, webs & videogames. During the last years, these previous experiences of applying interactive narrative techniques in digital historical or educational products have served to developed interactive narratives applied to health education, treatment or recovery. Two of the projects developed by the USC’s Labyrinth Project, directed by Marsha Kinder, are examples of the application of experiences in other narrative genres to health edutainment. This paper analyzes the interactive narrative elements integrated on the interfaces of the projects:

A Tale of Two MAO Genes

&

Interacting with Autism

. This analysis develops a model that describes the interactive immersive narrative elements integrated on their interfaces. It serves to identify the interactive narrative elements that create immersion in edutainment health projects so they can be applied on new narratives about recovering from addiction.

This paper explores the what-ifs for a possible future scenario describing how to develop software systems for sustainability in different application domains in a generic software development setting. The design fiction we narrate is the following: Valery, a software developer at the fictitious software development company GreenCode, works on CodeFairy, an educational game targeted at attracting girls to computer science, and uses the software engineering toolkit GreenYaCode as development environment.

This toolkit helps to translate domain-dependent, high-level sustainability goals into software-specific constraints - i.e. it helps design sustainability into the software system. This is achieved by an extensive knowledge base that allows making recommendations to the software developer, and by best practices from open sources software development and user experience best practices.

Based on the pattern shown in the nose of innovation graphic of Bill Buxton, this paper investigates future developments and construct a future scenario regarding technology, interaction and expectations of affordances in the next 5 to 10 years. The research is based in the Delphi method to help construct scenarios of possibilities as it helps identify expectations of incremental and drastic innovations. The method brings together specialists on user experience, usability, information architecture, technology and network, with experience and points of view from five different cities around the world.

Ubiquitous computing technologies now offer attractive possibilities to embed fictionality in the real world. This opens a new arena to navigate human behavior. Virtual forms representing fictionality and incorporated into our daily artifacts and media will become an infrastructure for navigating human behavior through the incorporated fictionality. In this paper, we describe two topics towards the realization of such a goal. The first topic presents that transmedia storytelling is a promising technique to incorporate fictionality into the real world. The second topic shows that the value-based analysis framework is a promising tool to analyze a sense of reality on the fictionality embedded into the real world and the reality is essential to make human behavior navigation successful. We present two case studies to demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach.