Human-Computer Interaction: Design and Evaluation

Intuition is a widely employed term when describing or evaluating user interfaces in an HCI context. It is used in by most people in their daily life, regardless of technology use; it is applied by users in various socio-technical contexts; it is even utilized by developers themselves. While Susanne Bødker and others brought activity theory into the HCI discourse, in much of the literature,

intuition

has largely remained within the cognitive science discourse. In an activity theoretical approach, this paper attempts to connect intuitiveness to activity and pointing out the changing perception of the concept of intuitiveness in relation to skill levels; changing from being connected primarily to artifacts at an unskilled level, to being linked exclusively to tasks and processes at expert level.

In this paper we report from a software development project, where much attention was given to the users – so much, in fact, that the developers moved in with them and stayed. Our aim has been to understand the effects of this level of proximity in the cooperation between developers and users. We discuss the impact on continuous knowledge exchange, organisational structure and accountability when the developers move in. How do the participants experience the mutual learning process? Based on the findings, we offer the two suggestions: (1) that the mutual learning necessary for establishing a common understanding of the character of a user-centred software system and its intuitive operation has a greater possibility of succeeding when developers and participating users are located in the immediate vicinity of each other, and (2) the impact on user interface design is visible through early user participation, leading to the sense of user interfaces facilitating an immediate user interaction.

The relation between HCI Education and the Industry needs is a challenge to the HCI community. HCI professors should be aware of their role to persuade students that user experience and experience design are cross-cutting concepts, which therefore influence all other areas involved in innovative product and service development, from conceptual design to implementation and testing. In this paper we present a revised HCI Brazilian syllabus for undergraduate Computer Science courses, discussing HCI requirements for UX professional and academic formation of the students. We also describe some research questions that have been raised in this context.

Data has become ubiquitous and pervasive influencing our perceptions and actions in ever more areas of individual and social life. Data production, collection and editing are complex actions motivated by data use. In this paper we present and characterize the field of study of Human-Data Interaction by discussing the challenges of how to enable understanding of data and information in this complex context, and how to facilitate acting on this understanding considering the social impact. By understanding interaction with data as a sign process, and identifying the goal of designing human-data interaction as enabling stakeholders to promote desired and to avoid undesired consequences of data use, we employ a semiotic perspective and define research challenges for the field.

Usability and trust have been observed to be related in several domains including web retail, information systems, and e-health. Trust in technology reflects beliefs about the attributes of a technology. Research has shown that trust is a key factor for the success of different systems – e.g., e-market, e-commerce, and social networks. Trust in technology can be supported or prevented by the perceived usability. Therefore, a low level of usability could compromise an individual’s trust in their use of a technology, resulting in a negative attitude towards a product. Even if this relationship has been seen as important in the fields listed above, there is limited research which empirically assesses trust and usability in virtual reality (VR). This work will present the first set of data on the relationship between usability and trust in VR. To gather this data, three different VR systems (Desktop 3D tool, CAVE, and a flight simulator) were tested. The findings show that (i) the best-known questionnaire to measure usability and trust could be applied to VR, (ii) there is a strong relationship between people’s satisfaction and trust in the use of VR, (iii) the relationship between usability and trust exists for different systems.

Culture strongly influences people’s values, expectations, behavior, and even perceptions and cognitive reasoning. Although HCI researchers recognize culture as an important factor, the research about cultural issues and HCI needs to go further. This paper discusses why culture should not be viewed as a threat or something that is better to relegated to minor importance in Human-Computer Interaction, but that has a key role in the investigations and development of new theories, methods and techniques. In the light of the grand challenges prospected in GranDIHC-BR by the Brazilian HCI community, we explore some of the opportunities and challenges culture brought to HCI as a research area.

The aim of this paper is to illustrate the design process and development of a novel model for cause - effect artificial intelligence system, which is based on the digital endocrine model in human computer interaction. The model is inspired by the architecture of the endocrine system, which is the system of glands that each of them secretes different type of hormones directly into the bloodstream. The digital hormonal model can provide a new methodology in order to model various advanced artificial intelligence models for predictive analysis, knowledge representation, planning, learning, perception and intelligent analysis. Artificial glands are the resource of the causes in the proposed model where the effects can be modeled in the data stream. In this paper such system is employed in order to develop a robotic system for the purpose of language translation.

We developed a quantitative model based on game theory related to IT security promotion and implementation in an organization. This model clarified the kinds of organizational conditions in which an employee does or does not carry out security measures. We also clarified the desired and undesired conditions for security implementation in an organization. In addition, we showed that an extremely undesirable dilemma that hitherto has not attracted attention might occur. Then we applied this model to an incident that occurred at a certain school. Using public information and survey data, we calculated the parameters of the model quantitatively. Then we found what kinds of changes to the parameters would be effective for making security improvements. Furthermore, we used the model to show the appropriate order of promoting security measures.

Information Systems are composed in four main portions, people, information, appliance and facilities. These four portions are called information assets. Information security protects information assets and keeps safe them from the view point of Confidentiality, Integrity and Availability (CIA).

Recently, cyber-attacks to people in specific organizations are called advanced persistent threat (APT) or targeted attacks. APT attacks are attacks using psychological and behavioral science weakness of people, are not technical attacks.

Kevin Mitnick, the most competent and the most famous attacker for people says “Security is not a technology problem. It is a human and management problems” in his book.

By using the knowledge of psychology, behavioral science and criminology, the attackers attack people, and achieve the purposes. Targets of the attacks are not only the direct objects that are theft or destruction of information, but also the indirect objects that obtain the information necessary to achieve the goal.

Sun Tzu, a Chinese military general, strategist and philosopher said “If you know your enemies and know yourself, you can win a hundred battles without a single loss”.

Attackers and victims are classified into people, appliance (hardware and software) and hybrid (people and appliance).

The methods of attackers for each attack and cases of attacks are classified in this paper.

Some organizations are beginning to use the elements of games and competitions to motivate employees, and customers. This is known as gamification which is the application of game elements and digital game design techniques to non-game problems, such as business and social impact challenges.

Gamification is very useful for awareness training of information security, I believe.

This paper attempts to classify and systematize attackers, victims and the methods of attacks, as by psychology, behavioral science, criminal psychology, and cognitive psychology I have proposed some ideas for education, training and awareness for information security using the findings of psychology and behavioral science.

Pace of life is getting faster today, and it even affects the quality of people’s life. Time is so important to human while it also troubles us a lot. Sometimes time seems so valuable that we take everything to earn more seconds. However, during a vacation, we ignore the passing of time. We are willing to consider what kind of pace of life can bring us more happiness. Time sense becomes an important experience in our daily life. This research is trying to improve our time experiences of interaction with interface design. As we know, people without specialized training cannot count time precisely without a clock, while they surely have an individual habit of perceiving time. Psychology of time is a psychology about human’s time perception. Therefore, the research is a cross-over study of interaction and time psychology in terms of knowing how design can improve people’s time experiences.

This study takes some time psychology theories as a foundation to know about the principles of human’s perception of time. With the purpose of elevating the time experiences of people, three aspects are considered having effects on it: signal stimulus, time information processing and personal psychological condition.

Signal stimulus—human’s perception of time always depends on some time signals, which are necessary materials of the brain processing. They could be numbers, visual dimensions, colors, temperatures, sound volumes, frequency of motion and so on.

Time information processing: several time processing models and calculative strategies of the time duration explain basic rules of processing time information in a human brain.

Personal psychological conditions: different time perceptions can trigger different emotions. And people in different moods can have different feelings about the same time interval.

In the study, the author summarized four possibilities to bring people better time experiences.

Following that, some assumptions in accordance with the research were made. Based on these assumptions, several experimental products, which are calendar design and traffic lights design, are designed. Finally, some experiments were conducted to test if the new designs can indeed create better time experiences. And one of the experiments would be reported in this article.

In this paper we’re presenting the formalization of a set of guidelines to support interaction designers in their activities during the processes to design applications. We are using these guidelines in the construction phase of the design process and these strategies are being applied to support the interaction design of user’s workflow, integrating professional, personal and social contexts. These strategies were used in a hospital for treatment of chronic mental illness in Brazil. During this study we observed healthcare professionals in their daily activities and with these data we developed information and communication solutions to bring new technologies into their day-by-day activities, in the way not to interrupt their routines. After some data collection and analysis we evaluated the results of our research. These analyses helped us to understand some weak points in the design process that do not simplify the integration of the different contexts in which users are naturally inserted. Thus, we proposed a set of guidelines to an interaction design process with the objective of supporting interaction designers in their work of developing natural solutions, integrating the different contexts of the users. Also, with the integration of contexts, we promote the extending of user’s abilities.

The prototyping process is a key phase in the design of interactive systems. Designing connections and communications for computational elements is a challenging part of constructing physical interactive prototypes. The goal of this study is to explore and describe the practices and technologies used in the construction of physical interactive prototypes in a university course on interaction design. This study reviews constructed physical interactive prototypes, presents excerpts of interviews with students, and analyses students’ blogs. In particular, the study describes and analyzes how connections and communications were made and which components and technologies were used in a course on interaction design. Finally, the implications of the findings of this study are discussed.

A revision is currently being undertaken of ISO 9241-11, published in 1998 to provide guidance on usability. ISO-9241-11 defines usability in terms of effectiveness, efficiency and satisfaction in a particular context of use. The intention was to emphasise that usability is an outcome of interaction rather than a property of a product. This is now widely accepted. However, the standard also places emphasis on usability measurement and it is now appreciated that there is more to usability evaluation than measurement. Other developments include an increasing awareness of the importance of the individual user’s emotional experience as discretionary usage of complex consumer products and use of the World Wide Web have became more widespread. From an organisational perspective, it is now appreciated that usability plays an important role in managing the potentials risks that can arise from inappropriate outcomes of interaction. The revision of ISO 9241-11 takes account of these issues and other feedback.

Nowadays, international companies have been using different strategies in order to obtain more attractive products and get a higher impact on the market. But when referring to software products, it is necessary to keep in mind that such strategies are affected by specific quality criteria as usability. Usability and marketing can be combined to offer more attractive products. In fact, specific instances of marketing technics have been gradually adopted by software engineers to improve usability. All in all, there is a lack of systematic approaches dealing with the integration of both marketing and usability through activities in a user-centered development process. To face such challenge, in this paper we have selected the most important marketing strategies to be integrated as activities in a user-centered process model. Activities were classified into Pre-Development, Development and Post-Development, and they have been sorted out depending on the marketing processes taking place before, during and after the development of a software product, respectively.

Although both agile developers and UX designers have a common concern regarding to build software with quality, they usually have different viewpoint of the user experience and usability. We have proposed a protocol in which personas and Nielsen’s heuristics were used as a common vocabulary between designers and developers (SCRUM team) for the communication of recommendations and/or design solutions. We have adopted action research to conduct our research, performing a workshop and interviews to study the feasibility of the proposal; and later two case studies to compare and evaluate the use and non-use the protocol. In the final, adding to the case study comparison, we interviewed the SCRUM team who revealed that the protocol improved the understanding of recommendations and the Nielsen’s heuristics contributed to objectively communicate the main problems of interaction.

In this paper we present a description of a proposed hybrid, remote usability testing method and a comparison of different approaches to participant recruitment for the test conducted according to this usability evaluation method. Moreover this paper contains a description of the implemented hybrid method and its characteristic. One of the main features of this method is that it allows to perform remote online tests. These tests are an alternative to traditional laboratory tests. They don’t require a special laboratory space, gathering participants in one place, a moderator or other equipment to perform the tests. However we have to face a challenge – how to recruit participants for remote usability test, which is more complicated because we must motivate our users to participate in such test without having a direct contact with them.

This paper presents a comparison of a few selected methods that we used to encourage users of website

HotelGo24.com

to take part in usability evaluation test of that site. We present how many users were ready to participate in our study depending on the applied method of encouragement and their reward for participating in the study.

Brain-Robot Interaction (BRI) research has mainly focused on analyzing system’s performance through objective data. Recently research on Brain-Computer Interfaces (BCI) has begun moving towards applications that go beyond the lab and medical settings. To create successful BRI applications in the future for healthy users User Experience (UX) should be evaluated throughout the development process. This paper discusses single and cooperative BRI systems and analyzes affective and objective task performance data collected while cognitively controlling a robot. Also this paper discusses how this approach can benefit future research on the usability of BRI applications.

It is often said that there is an age difference in the use of ICT devices such as cell phones and smartphones, but the empirical evidences are rare regarding the details of the literacy and the use of such devices. The usability and satisfaction of such devices and applications are important for users. In this paper, authors focus on the factors influencing satisfaction with smartphone application use.

This paper refers to the significance of defining and using personas for the design and development of technological solutions for informal care. It not only argues for the importance of carefully defining personas, but also discusses the influence that personas exert in the design decisions made throughout the process. We illustrate these two aspects with empirical results gathered in the project TOPIC – The Online Platform for Informal Caregivers – in which a series of online technological solutions are being designed and developed to integrate a

CarePortfolio

to provide caregivers with emotional, informational and tangible support, as they go on to handle their care responsibilities.

The communication and interpretation of users’ intentions play a key role in collaborative web discussions. However, existing mechanisms fail to support the users’ expression of their intentions during collaborations. In this article, we propose an original interaction design method based on semiotics to guide the construction of interactive mechanisms, which allow users to explicitly express and share intentions. We apply the method in a case study in the context of collaborative forums for software developers. The obtained results reveal preliminary evidences regarding the effectiveness of the method for the definition of interface components, enabling more meaningful and successful communications.

In this paper, a history of usability concept is reviewed including Shackel and Richardson, Nielsen, and ISO standards to show how the usability is located among relevant quality characteristics. Secondly, the importance of subjective quality is emphasized in relation to the usability. Thirdly, the concept of quality in use is considered in relation to the usability. Finally, a new scheme on quality characteristics is presented.

This paper presents an automatized creation process for Personas user modeling focus on minimize stereotyping and to increase Persona’s reuse on many different projects. This creation process has focus on similarity and automation which, are some main issues of variation from project to project. We discuss this process applying it on two different projects. First is a medical web system (HCI-M) and the second one is a human-robot interaction project with Sony AIBO pet robot (HRI-P). Results show that the process makes possible to minimize the stereotyping and also we reuse Personas from project HCI-M to help us on planning phase of project HRI-P which, turns it practicable.

In this paper, we present the application of User Diaries in the context of connection dispatching. Connection dispatching is a field with quickly rising requirements which also affect the used dispatching support software. The usage of User Diaries will be motivated for this specific domain. The diary will briefly be presented as well as the results of the study. We will point out the advantages and disadvantages using User Diaries in the given context.

Evaluation in Information Visualization is inherently complex, and it is still a challenge. Whereas it is possible to adapt evaluation methods from other fields, as Human-Computer Interaction, this adaptation may not be straightforward since visualization applications are very specific interactive systems.

This paper addresses issues in using heuristic evaluation to evaluate visualizations and visualization applications, and presents an exploratory study in two phases and involving 25 evaluators aimed at assessing the understandability and effectiveness of three sets of heuristics that have been used in Information Visualization.

Much interaction design research has been devoted to collaborative systems, resulting in diverse design methodologies. Despite these efforts, we still lack a widely adopted interaction model for collaborative systems design. In this paper, we present a study on model-based design approaches, focusing on their limitations with respect to the 3C Model of Collaboration. Based on the 3C Model, we propose an extension to MoLIC, an interaction design language grounded in semiotic engineering but with no support for collaboration. We then illustrate the expressiveness of the extended MoLIC in the interaction design representation of a collaborative document editor.

Informational and reference websites benefit readers without providing their publishing organizations with any direct or immediate financial benefit; however, organizations do expect return on their investment. We propose two website stakeholder taxonomies: one about the goals of readers when they use informational websites and the other about the goals of organizations when they produce sites. These taxonomies should help organizations measure readers’ success with their sites and understand how well their sites support the organizations’ goals, and in turn help them author and design better web content to meet their readers’ goals.

Simulation-based training for prehospital emergency care is characterized by high degrees of complexity. Thorough knowledge of both the work and the setting is crucial and it is therefore important to involve both end-users and other stakeholders during the whole design process. This paper investigates a design process by focusing on how project participants experience the work process and participation of a multi-disciplinary, research-practitioner design team. This case study focuses on the work within a development project of a new prehospital emergency training facility. Open-ended interviews were conducted with the project participants halfway through the project. Strikingly, the results show that while there are problems and tensions that potentially could overturn the project, all participants express strong satisfaction with their participation in the project. This implies that the accumulated positive experiences are so strong that they overshadow tensions and problems that under other circumstances could have caused a project breakdown.

Designing documents with folds is a difficult task with current desktop publishing software, and this subject is also hardly explored in the academic literature. Because the flat nature of the screen, document design is limited to a two dimensional space, demanding extra effort from designers to place the art with respect to the folds, sometimes forcing them to resort to paper prototyping. Results from interviews performed with design experts, helped us to understand the challenges and needs faced by them during the document creations. This paper presents an interactive visualization approach to compose foldable documents and to interact with the results without resorting to external means. We consider that a foldable document such as brochure is composed by panels joined at the edges and the content of each panel is designed separately. We describe our interactive approach and the results generated by a prototype we developed to support the composition of foldable documents.

With rapid advances in natural language generation (NLG), voice has now become an indispensable modality for interaction with smart phones. Most of the smart phone manufacturers have their Voice Assistant application designed with some form of personalization to enhance user experience. However, these designs are significantly different in terms of usage support, features, naturalness and personality of the voice assistant avatar or the character. Therefore the question remains that what is the kind of Voice Assistant that users would prefer. In this study we followed a User Centered Design approach for the design of a Voice Assistant from scratch. Our primary objective was to define the personality of a Voice Assistant Avatar and formulating a few design guidelines for natural dialogues and expressions for the same. The attempt was kept to design the voice assistant avatar with optimal natural or human like aspects and behavior. This paper provides a summary of our journey and details of the methodology used in realizing the design of a natural voice assistant. As research contribution, apart from the methodology we also share some of the guidelines and design decisions which may be very useful for related research.

The paper presents comparative investigation of the effectiveness of three algorithms used for optimizing control panel objects’ arrangements. We examined two modified classical approaches involving changing of objects’ pairs, that is CRAFT, and its simplified version as well as our implementation of the Simulated annealing concept. Their behavior was investigated in experimental simulation studies of two real-life problems: the truck control panel (small number of objects) and the control panel from a nuclear energy plant (big number of items). The statistical analysis of the obtained results showed the supremacy of the proposed version of the simulated annealing algorithm in both case studies.

Following the integration of mobile applications into the mobility information system of public transport, public transport companies seek new opportunities to reduce paper-based information. A common example for these new opportunities is the so called ‘paperless stop point’. This paper describes different expansion stages of public displays for mobility information at stop points, based on empirical evaluations with users and experts. Four stages are discussed, which range from static information screens to individual interactive displays. In addition, the widespread expectations of users and transport companies are described, which provide the base for the stage development, are described. As a result, this paper provides insight into typical challenges towards paperless mobility information at stop points in public transport.

In order to manage interruptions adequately, the prediction of an office worker’s uninterruptible duration is desired. We assumed three factors that may affect this uninterruptible duration: the type of work, the person’s level of concentration, and the frequency with which the person is disturbed by others. For features related to the type of work, we adopted category of using application and determined the ratio of key-to-mouse usage. The rates of keystroke and mouse operation and the application-switching frequency were selected to reflect a person’s concentration at work. A time of day was selected as an index which reflects the disturbance frequency. We then analyzed the relationship between these indices and the uninterruptible duration using 1200-h data. The results showed that, except for the time of day, a significant relationship exists between the uninterruptible duration and these indices. The combination of these indices appears promising for predicting the uninterruptible duration.

Although it is important for our daily lives and works to keep things tidy and in order, it is difficult to always keep it especially in the shared space because it is unclear who has the responsibility. In this study, therefore, a method to persuade them to change their daily behaviors has been proposed from the concept of Ambient Intelligence. In order to realize the method, a system has been developed to encourage them to keep things tidy and in order by personifying the shared space. The personified system expresses its emotions in response to the degree of the disorder. The system consists of (1) a disorder estimation function from the captured image of the shared space by a camera, (2) an emotion creation function of the personified space by the transition of the disorder, and (3) an emotion expression function in appropriate timing. In addition, a case study had been conducted for 31 days to evaluate the system in a student room of a laboratory. As the result, the longer they stayed in the room, the more they watched the messages of the personified room, and improved their consciousness and habituation of keeping the room in order. However, the users who rarely stayed in the room did not improve the habituation.

To eliminate the distraction caused by inappropriately timed e-mail delivery notification, we constructed a prototype e-mail delivery mediation system. The system was designed to mediate incoming e-mails based on user interruptibility, which is estimated from PC operational activities of the user. The system delivers e-mails at higher interruptibility times, especially at application switching moments, which are considered a substitute for task breakpoints in work which uses PC. A trial experiment with eight participants in an ordinary working environment was conducted. The experiment results suggested that e-mails were delivered at higher estimated interruptibility times and decreased feelings of hindrance regarding incoming e-mails. However, there were e-mail deliveries at low interruptibility moments even though participants were using the system. Therefore, further study must be conducted to improve the system and to conduct analysis on work efficiency.

This paper presents a workflow-based concept of passenger information in public transport, in order to ensure a more intuitive and effective usage of mobile passenger information systems. The workflow-based navigation concept is derived from a pattern analysis and a field test of current mobile applications of passenger information, which mainly provide a function-based navigation. The results of a comparative usability test of workflow-based and function-based navigation concepts show, that workflow-based navigation can reduce the number of required tap actions in relation to function-based navigation concepts.

This study investigates what kind of mental image a design triggers when a user views the user interface and whether that image would be matched with the image of the real object in the user’s mind.

In this study, a standard scenario to design a remote control for lighting and temperature controls was given to 200 students completing an HCI course at graduate and undergraduate levels. The given scenario asked each student to provide a low fidelity prototype of a suggested design within a timeframe of 10 min. These prototypes were then classified and grouped into either concrete or abstract designs.

The results of these investigations show that a majority of participants perceive abstract representations for their design rather than concrete: a depiction of a real light switch to represent turning lights on and off.

In conventional pointing cursor environments, selecting a small object or an object that is at a distance from the cursor takes a considerable amount of time. To solve this problem, we propose a new pointing technique called “Airway Cursor.” In the proposed technique, to select a target object, all users need to do is to specify the direction toward the target object. To specify the direction, the user simply moves the cursor a little toward the target object and then clicks. If there are multiple objects between the cursor and the target object, the user can select the target object by carrying out this operation on the intervening non-target objects until the target object is reached. This technique reduces the time to select an object by shortening the distance the mouse has to move.

Advances in Genetics have revealed that many diseases are related to genetic factors. In this context, family health histories play an increasingly important role in healthcare, aiding practitioners in the diagnosis, risk assessment and treatment of various conditions. The clinical pedigree, a graphic representation combining family structure and clinical information, is a well-accepted tool to represent family health histories. At present this tool remains underused, possibly due to the lack of pedigree management tools in health information systems. OntoFam addresses this problem by offering a clinical pedigree information system that can be integrated with current health information systems. This paper presents the method used to create OntoFam’s interactive pedigree visualization by wrapping an existing open source pedigree drawing engine. The resulting environment allows practitioners to interactively view, create and manipulate pedigrees. This paper also describes the evaluation strategy that was developed to assess the system and includes its preliminary results.

The mobility behavior of the European population has undergone significant changes in recent years. New services like bike, car and ridesharing are arising. The integrated use of different transport modes can be supported effectively by the features and services of sophisticated smartphones. This paper describes the methodology and research results concerning users’ behavior, needs, and requests with regard to intermodal mobility applications.

The objective of this study is to introduce a method to abstract complex components in order to create a complete and functional user interface, simplifying the complexity process of user interface design. An example of a simple user interface of a game for younger children is explained and its visual states and transitions represented through a state diagram. However, the level of detail provided by simple components, to represent the user interface is very extensive, making lengthy the interface designing process. Thus, it was decided to increase the abstraction level by introducing a new complex component structure which, due to its encapsulation feature, allows to group components into other more complex components, but with more functionality. An abstraction process through grouping components by levels is detailed, with the intention of proving the validity of the

complex component

concept to simplify the creation of complete, free and functional user interfaces.

This paper discusses a pattern-matching method with regular expressions for mathematical expressions on electronic documents. In ordinary regular expressions, a pattern is described as a string with meta-characters. However, strings are unsuitable for mathematical expressions because of their two-dimensional structure (e.g., fractions, superscripts, and subscripts). In addition, meta-characters for regular expressions are frequently used as normal characters, forcing users to type escape characters. Therefore, in this study, we propose a graphical user interface (GUI) to create patterns for mathematical expressions.

In this study we look at user judgments like perceived quality and also visual appeal from an emotional perspective. This is important to examine since unlike existing studies that focus on the cognitive mechanism of first impression judgments, we use aesthetics framework forwarded by Lavie and Tractinsky, and Russells’ circumplex model of emotions to examine the phenomenon. We also try to answer whether aesthetics lead to significant affective responses from users, which then trickle into quality perceptions and visual appeal, which are otherwise considered higher order judgments. Measurement of emotions has mostly been done through subjective evaluation e.g. self-report or survey. We use objective data (electro-dermal activity for arousal and facial electromyography for valence) in addition to subjective data to measure emotions. We design custom mobile app interfaces which users get exposed to achieve effective aesthetic manipulation.

In this paper, we describe a smartphone application that aims at motivating users to use facial expressions. This has a twofold goal: to reintroduce the use of facial expressions as nonverbal means in the computer-mediated communication of emotions and to provide the opportunity for self-reflection about the personal emotional states while fostering smiles in order to improve mental wellbeing. This paper provides a description of the developed prototype and reports the results of a first observation study conducted during an interactive event.

In this study, the correlation between six basic emotions (happy, sad, angry, disgusted, scared, and neutral) and brain signals evoked by head-up display (HUD) images were found. 20 participants were exposed to 18 different HUD images in the laboratory and driving simulator-based settings. 16-channel electroencephalography (EEG) signals were obtained during exposure to each HUD image and were later used to calculate three EEG indices (EEG activity, concentration level and relaxation level). The participants reported their emotions induced by the observation of each HUD image on semantic differential scales with two bipolar adjectives (range: 1–7). Results showed that color was a key factor for determining the type of emotion evoked, whereas the amount of information provided determined the levels of brain activity in the central lobe. Neural activities in the temporal lobe showed a strong association with the concentration level. These findings between emotions and EEG signals can be used for designing a new type of DVI (driver-vehicle interface).

Our body representation and sense of self is constantly updated starting from the integration of different sensory inputs. Synchronous bodily stimulation has been used to manipulate sense of self, and can be applied to user experience design. This study manipulated multimodal stimulation to test factors potentially affecting mood and interpersonal closeness. The independent variables were: (1) the presence or absence of a haptic device (neck massager) on the participant; (2) the presentation of one of two videos, in which an actor expressed either energy or calmness while wearing the haptic device; and (3) the pre- and post-intervention time factor. The results showed a main effect for time for all dependent variables. A three-way interaction effect was evident for the measures of calmness and interpersonal closeness. The greatest reported increase in interpersonal closeness occurred in the haptic-energy video condition, an effect that was consistent with one of the study’s hypotheses.

Gamification means using video game elements to improve user experience and user engagement in non-game services and applications. This article describes the effects when gamification is used in work contexts. Here we focus on industrial production. We describe how facial recognition can be employed to measure and quantify the effect of gamification on the users’ emotions.

The quantitative results show that gamification significantly reduces both task completion time and error rate. However, the results concerning the effect on emotions are surprising. Without gamification there are not only more unhappy expressions (as to expect) but surprisingly also more happy expressions. Both findings are statistically highly significant.

We think that in redundant production work there are generally more (negative) emotions involved. When there is no gamification happy and unhappy balance each other. In contrast gamification seems to shift the spectrum of moods towards “relaxed”. Especially for work environments such a calm attitude is a desirable effect on the users. Thus our findings support the use of gamification.

The emotional design approach has become increasingly preponderant for the design teams. However, we observed that most of the efforts of the designers to elicit positive emotions are based on empirical and subjective approaches. This paper shares the state of our current research towards the proposal of heuristics for emotional and empathic interfaces. We focus on the actual design practices, and discuss methodologies to assess the emotions elicited by these design strategies.

The emotion model of the Smart Virtual Worker is the result of three years of interdisciplinary research. After successful implementation and pre-validation of the model and the surrounding simulation architecture, the model had to be calibrated by using real life working scenarios. The task of carrying differently weighed boxes over a 30 m distance was chosen as the foundation for the model. Subsequent fitting of the model led to a positive evaluation outcome which presented a mean 88 % fitting of the model’s simulated emotional valence in relation to the observed real world behavior.

Valid interpretation of the nonverbal behavior of the people involved in negotiations is important. Computational agents that are designed for negotiation benefit from the ability to interpret human nonverbal behavior for communicating more effectively and achieving their goals. In this paper, we demonstrate how the mode of involvement and relational affect of the negotiators involved in the interaction can be determined by several nonverbal behaviors such as that of the mouth, head, hand movements, posture and the facial expressions of the negotiators. We use machine learning to study involvement and affect in negotiation. Our results show that the prediction models built based on non-verbal cues can help identify the negotiator’s attitudes and motivation in the interaction.

The ability of humans to effectively interact socially relies heavily on their awareness of the context the interaction takes place. In order for computer systems to accordingly possess the same ability, it is crucial they are also context-aware in terms of a formalization of context based on the W5+ framework aspects of Who, What, Why, Where, What and How. Research work presented in this paper contributes towards this goal by bridging the conceptual gap and exploiting semantics and cognitive and affective information of non verbal behavior and investigating whether and how this information could be incorporated in automatic analysis of affective behavior. A semantic concept extraction methodology is proposed and its application to indicative examples from the SEMAINE corpus is presented that validates the proposed approach.

Research of human-computer interaction in exhibition design previously focuses more on how technologies could be used to create splendid effect or impressive experience [

1

], rather than to interwoven technology with metaphoric, intuitive and narrative content. While in socio-cultural exhibition, the communication of meaning and knowledge itself is more emphasized. Besides, emotional engagement, which could evoke memory, feelings and cognition, could be an important method for HCI in exhibition design. However, less study has explored this area. In this article, the potentials of emotional engagement for HCI in exhibition design are outlined through a project in Shek Kip Mei district in Hong Kong. The project have three stages: documentation, abstraction and conceptualization. It represents one possible flow that could generate emotional engagement from the socio-cultural contents for visitors. The experience gained from this project could facilitate designers, planners, museum curators and academic researchers in creating emotional engaged exhibition.