Human-Computer Interaction – INTERACT 2007

This paper discusses how semiotic engineering can support the formulation of problems and solutions involved in handling face-to-face (F2F) sociability models in computer-mediated communication (CMC). Based on a case study where a group of users migrated through different types of CMC systems, we show that the designer’s model of F2F sociability is extensively signified and encoded into technology, whether they know it or not. Users are deeply affected by the designers’ F2F sociability models. Two qualitative methods of analysis are used to reveal the richness of interpretive and communicative processes in which online communities are involved, and the interplay of designers’ and users’ signs at interaction time.

The dissemination of information in social networks and the relative effect of ICT (Information and Communications Technology) use has long been an interesting area of study in the field of sociology, human computer interaction and computer supported cooperative work. To date, a lot of research has been conducted regarding an actor’s mobile phone usage behavior while disseminating information within a mobile social network. In this study, we explore the structured network position of individuals using mobile phone and their ability to disseminate information within their social network. Our proposition is that an actor’s ability to disseminate information within a social group is affected by their structural network position. In this paper, we determine an actor’s structural network position by four different measures of centrality-(i) degree, (ii) closeness, (iii) betweenness, and (iv) eigenvector centrality. We analyse the Reality Mining dataset, which contains mobile phone usage data over a 9 month period for exploring the association between the structural positions of different actors in a temporal communication. We extract relational data to construct a social network of the mobile phone users in order to determine the association between their position in the network and their ability to disseminate information. The following questions form the basis for this study: Does information dissemination capability of an actor reflect their structural position within a social network? How do different measures of centrality associate with the information dissemination capability of an actor? Are highly central actors able to disseminate information more effectively than those who have a lower central position within a social network?

This paper presents Manas, a Semiotic Engineering epistemic tool for the design of collaborative systems (CoSys) whose aim is to expand the designers’ knowledge and awareness of their influence on groups and group dynamics. Manas has been developed to help designers represent their conception of computer-mediated communication and reflect upon some of its potential social effects, springing from user-system interaction, as well from user-user interaction (through the system). The paper illustrates how Manas can lead designers to reflect upon both the design problem and its proposed solution(s), which allows them to make more conscious decisions. Increased knowledge and awareness should then enhance the quality of CoSys design.

Group efficacy has begun to receive more attention in HCI. The paper describes a mixed-design experiment aimed to explore the effect of time on group efficacy development in two computer-mediated virtual conditions: asynchronous vs. multi-synchronous teams. The relationships of group efficacy measures at different times and tool evaluation, team satisfaction and performance are also explored. Forty university students who participate in the study are administered questionnaires over the course of the assigned ten-day task. Results show group efficacy changes as a function of time in the asynchronous environment. In addition, the positive relations between group efficacy and tool evaluation and adoption and team satisfaction were demonstrated for asynchronous groups. The findings indicate group efficacy is dynamic with team development and useful in signaling how technology and collaboration modes impact user experience and interaction in the asynchronous environment.

Shared interface allowing several users in co-presence to interact simultaneously on digital data on a single display is an uprising challenge in Human Computer Interaction (HCI). Its development is motivated by the advent of large displays such as wall-screens and tabletops. It affords fluid and natural digital interaction without hindering human communication and collaboration. It enables mutual awareness, making participant conscious of each other activities.

In this paper, we are interested in Mixed Presence Groupware (MPG), when two or more remote shared interfaces are connected for a distant collaborative session. Our contribution strives to answer to the question: Can the actual technology provide sufficient presence feeling of the remote site to enable efficient collaboration between two distant groups?

We propose

DigiTable

, an experimental platform we hope lessen the gap between collocated and distant interaction.

DigiTable

is combining a multiuser tactile interactive tabletop, a video-communication system enabling eye-contact with real size distant user visualization and a spatialized sound system for speech transmission. A robust computer vision module for distant users’ gesture visualization completes the platform.

We discuss first experiments using

DigiTable

for a collaborative task (mosaic completion) in term of distant mutual awareness. Although

DigiTable

does not provide the same presence feeling in distant and or collocated situation, a first and important finding emerges: distance does not hinder efficient collaboration anymore.

When people collaborate remotely, the WWW is part of the shared resources they use together. However, web pages do not offer support for collaborative interaction such as viewing or influencing another user’s browsing session – additional software needs to be installed for these features. In this paper, we present UsaProxy 2, an HTTP proxy that allows the same web page or application to be viewed and used in two browsers at the same time, without client-side software installation. This includes a visualisation of the remote user’s mouse pointer, scrolling, keyboard input, following links to other pages and more. Our open-source proxy modifies HTML pages before delivering them to the browsers. The added JavaScript code provides session monitoring and shared browsing facilities. We conducted an experimental evaluation which shows that our approach works for different scenarios, such as shopping online and exchanging ideas on what to buy. The user study showed that our approach is accepted and liked by users. Combined with audio or text chat communication, it provides a very useful tool for informal, ad-hoc collaboration.

Users’ attention was investigated by eye tracking, combined with reported rating of areas of interest, and free recall memory of six operational websites. The sites differed in the pattern of fixations recorded depending on their layout structure. Fixation durations and areas of interest were generally correlated but exceptions were present in both directions. The sites which were rated more attractive overall had an open layout and high density fixations on animations. The sites which were preferred overall had column layout, and content with brand seemed to be the more important determinants for preference. Fixation densities were closely related to reported user interest for 4/6 sites but not for two e-commerce sites. Reported attention, positive memory and overall preference were weakly related.

This paper describes a novel browsing paradigm, taking benefit of the various types of links (e.g. thematic, temporal, references, etc.) that can be automatically built between multimedia documents. This browsing paradigm can help eliciting multimedia archives’ hidden structures or expanding search results to related media. The paper intend to present a novel model for browsing any kind of multimedia archives and further focuses on an archive of meetings recordings, in order to illustrate the advantage of our method to perform cross-meetings and in general cross-documents browsing. First of all, the structure of meeting datasets is presented, describing in particular the media implied, the annotations used for cross-document linking and the major mining techniques integrated in this work. Then, the paper presents at a glance the visual browser we developed that combines searching and browsing by links. Further, the performances of the actual system are discussed, i.e. the automatic indexing and linking processes for the two different meeting corpora, as well as the access and browsing performances. Finally, the paper presents the major unsolved issues and our perspectives for future works.

In recent years, improvements in semantic web technologies have given us new expressive description languages for modeling knowledge domains — the so called ontologies. Nevertheless, ontology editors lack of easy and intuitive user interfaces, so that the exploration and creation of ontologies is often too difficult to be efficient. In this short paper, we introduce a new tree widget which utilizes sophisticated visualization and interaction features for ontology exploration and editing as a work in progress study. Due to space limitations we co+ncentrate here on the aspect of ontology browsing.

We present S

3

, a system that implicitly captures the process and products of Web

investigations

(exploratory searches involving multiple queries). This automatically-created, persistent representation of an investigation enables future review and continuation of suspended search activities. This persistent representation can reduce unnecessary re-execution of queries and enable users to quickly regain the context of a resumed activity. Stored investigations can also be shared with, and augmented by, collaborators. Furthermore, a stored investigation can act as a

standing query

, proactively updating itself when a user revisits it.

In this paper we present a new algorithm for automatic recognition of hand drawn sketches based on the Levenshtein distance. The purpose for drawing sketches in our application is to create graphical user interfaces in a similar manner as the well established paper sketching. The new algorithm is trainable by every user and improves the recognition performance of the techniques which were used before for widget recognition. In addition, this algorithm ay serve for recognizing other types of sketches, such as letters, figures, and commands. In this way, there is no modality disruption at sketching time.

While user interface (UI) prototyping is generally considered useful, it may often be too expensive and time-consuming. This problem becomes even more severe through the ubiquitous use of a variety of devices such as PCs, mobile phones and PDAs, since each of these devices has its own specifics that require a special user interface.

Instead of developing UI prototypes directly, we propose specifying one interaction design from which UIs can be automatically generated for multiple devices. Our implemented approach uses communicative acts, which derive from speech act theory and carry desired intentions in interactions. Models of communicative acts, UI domain objects and interaction sequences comprise interaction design specifications in our approach and are based on a metamodel that we have defined. We support the development of such models through an IDE, which is coupled with the UI generator. This allows a new form of UI prototyping, where the effects of each model change can be seen immediately in the automatically generated UIs for every device at once.

Multi-fidelity prototyping combines within a single user interface prototype several elements whose representations are reproduced with different levels of fidelity with respect to the final user interface: no fidelity at all, low fidelity, medium fidelity, and high fidelity. In order to effectively and efficiently support multi-fidelity, an original set of techniques is defined and discussed: multiple representation manipulation by sketching and gesture recognition, smooth transition between any representation at any time, prototype reusability, multi-platform support, and multiple user interface prototyping facilities. The full implementation of these techniques in prototyping software provides designers and developers with a unique environment for exploring multiple designs with unprecedented support for quickly designing interfaces from scratch or from previously existing design templates. An experimental study reveals that the multiple representation manipulation together with smooth transition represents a valuable advantage for naturally designing user interfaces. The prototyping software supports several aspects involved in the user interface development life cycle and is convenient for non-WIMP user interfaces.

Fast production of a solution is a necessity in the world of competitive IT consulting business today. In engagements where early user interface design mock-ups are needed to visualize proposed business processes, the need to quickly create UI becomes prominent very early in the process. Our work aims to speed up the UI design process, enabling rapid creation of low-fidelity UI design with traditional user-centered design thinking but different tooling concepts. This paper explains the approach and the rationale behind our model and tools. One key focal point is in leveraging business process models as a starting point of the UI design process. The other focal point is on using a model-driven approach with designer-centered tools to eliminate some design overheads, to help manage a large design space, and to cope with changes in requirements. We used examples from a real business engagement to derive and strengthen this work.

Ubiquitous interaction places the user in the centre of dynamic configurations of technology, where work not necessarily is performed through a single personal computer, but supported by a multiplicity of technologies and physical devices. This paper presents an activity-theoretically based framework for analyzing

ubiquitous substitution

, i.e. a set of mediators that are or can be continuously substituted with the purpose of highlighting expected and indented uses, and the conflicts encountered when attempting substitution between them. The paper develops a four-leveled analysis of such mediators, and point towards a minimalist approach to design of ubiquitous interaction.

Meta-design

is an emerging conceptual framework aimed at defining and creating socio-technical environments as living entities. It extends existing design methodologies focused on the development of a system at design time by allowing users to become co-designers at use time. Meta-design is grounded in the basic assumption that future uses and problems cannot be completely anticipated at design time, when a system is developed. Users, at use time, will discover mismatches between their needs and the support that an existing system can provide for them. Meta-design

extends boundaries

by supporting users as active contributors who can transcend the functionality and content of existing systems. By facilitating these possibilities,

control

is distributed among all stakeholders in the design process.

This paper characterizes different design methodologies and identifies the unique challenges and opportunities for meta-design. It illustrates this approach with two examples: (a)

Web2Gether

(enriching the organizational practices and community building of assistive technology teachers), and (b) the

Memory Aiding Prompting System (MAPS)

(addressing the needs of people with cognitive disabilities and their caregivers). Assessments of our developments are used to identify some future implications and challenges for meta-design and its role in socially responsible design.

Animation or sound is often used in user interfaces as an attempt to improve users’ perception and comprehension of evolving situations and support them in decision-making. However, empirical data establishing their real effectiveness on the comprehension of changes are still lacking. We have carried out an experiment using four combinations of visual and auditory feedback in a split attention task. The results not only confirm that such feedback improves the perception of changes, but they also demonstrate that animation and sound used alone or combined bring major improvements on the comprehension of a changing situation. Based on these results, we propose design guidelines about the most efficient combinations to be used in user interfaces.

In this paper, we describe the iterative design and evaluation of a storytelling application for individuals with expressive aphasia. Our user studies show that besides basic requirements for medical care and training, there is an unmet need of aphasics to share their daily experiences and activities, anecdotes and feelings with their significant others. Thus, the goal of the proposed design is to enhance aphasics’ quality of life by providing a platform for them to create and share their stories. More specifically, the goal is to enable them to play a more active role in social exchanges by providing them with a multimodal interface for storytelling that has the following functionalities: taking photos, making drawings and annotations, and recording sounds. In the end of this paper, we also summarize important design guidelines that surfaced during the course of this project and that are potentially relevant for other designers and researchers working with aphasics.

Many studies have shown how knowledge workers face challenges while multi-tasking among several projects and initiatives at the workplace. Researchers and consultants of personal productivity have identified practical strategies and processes that people use to face, plan and manage their activities. Our work is based on the analysis of those processes and strategies involved in personal activity management (PAM), emphasizing the planning aspects of it, with the goal of designing appropriate supportive information technology.

Many systems form ’chains’ whereby developers use one system (or ’tool’) to create another system, for use by other people. Little work within Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) has considered how usability considerations propagate through such chains and yet in many situations the usability of systems is determined by design decisions made at one or more steps removed from the immediate developers of the system in question. In this paper, we relate our experiences of developing digital library components and collections to this notion of ”design chains”. This case study illustrates the necessity of looking beyond the immediate users to try to anticipate the needs of stakeholders elsewhere in the design chain.

We present a prototype of an on-line assistant to support a training course about workspace safety issues. The application uses a common sense reasoning engine and the Brazilian Open Mind common sense knowledge base, to make inferences about concepts that might be unfamiliar to the students. We explore the use of metaphors and analogies to explain topics, enhancing learning by using similarities to help students associate related topics. We believe that common sense can be used to take into account cultural considerations while helping learners to build analogies. A survey of students showed that they considered analogies useful in the learning process, that the system was helpful in understanding new concepts, and that it helped connect the information searched for with common sense knowledge.

This paper analyzes the problem of evaluating elderly people’s perception of assistive robots and domotic environments. Specifically, we focus on aspects related to the modalities in which interaction can occur between an elder user and an assistive robotic agent. Our work benefits from the products of project

RoboCare

, namely, a domestic environment in which sensors, intelligent software components and a domestic robot provide a set of cognitive support services for the elder user. This paper analyzes a number of evaluation criteria in detail, specifically related to the robot’s aspect, the way in which it communicates with the user, and the perceived usefulness of its support services. Among these criteria, the paper proposes and reports an evaluation of the Proactive interaction modality (where the system takes the initiative) and On-demand interaction (in which the user explicitly requests a service). Users evaluate the On-demand support services in personal safety scenarios as particularly useful, and less so in scenarios which are not critical. The paper also provides a discussion which can be useful for the design of future assistive agents and robotic companions.

Changes in modern work environments, combined with advances in sensing and machine intelligence, have given rise to a new class of groupware applications that seeks to facilitate workplace communication through the prediction of future availability and/or location. We present the results of a four-month deployment of an experimental predictive calendar system in an academic setting. While participants appreciated several novel features of the system, most resisted adoption due to the uncertainty of its predictions, its effects on privacy and impression management, and accessibility issues. We present implications for designers who seek to incorporate forecasting components into their groupware tools using observations from the study.

The current generation of mobile devices is capable of producing polyphonic sounds, has enough processing power for real-time signal processing, and much better sound quality than their predecessors. The importance of audio is increasing as we are moving towards multimodal user interfaces where audio is one of the major components. In this paper, we present new ways of using audio feedback more efficiently and intelligently in mobile user interfaces by utilizing real-time signal processing. To test the ideas in practice, a prototype calendar application was implemented. We arranged a one week field trial to validate the design ideas. The results indicate that sound effects are capable of passing information to the user in some extent, but they are more useful in impressing the user and making existing audio feedback sound better.

In this paper we present a new hardware/software solution, which allows users to easily interact with their cars’ components through the OBD-II system. We propose a multimodal interface for PDAs supporting vocal and graphical commands. Our aim is to provide a safe and usable way to access the sensed engine data and vehicular status while driving. The retrieved information, which can be presented through different modalities, is used to alert the driver about some events, such as surpassing the speed limit.

We present the Adaptive Hybrid Cursor, a novel target acquisition technique for pen-based interfaces. To assist a user in a target selection task, this technique automatically adapts the size of the cursor and/or its contexts (the target size and the selection background) based on pen pressure input. We systematically evaluated the new technique with various 2D target acquisition tasks. The experimental results indicated that the Adaptive Hybrid Cursor had better selection performance, and was particularly effective for

small-target

and

high-density

environments in which the regular cursor and the Bubble Cursor [13] failed to show significant advantages. The Adaptive Hybrid Cursor is a novel way to improve target acquisition via pressure input, and our study demonstrated its viability and potential for pen-based interfaces.

In this paper, we present ThumbSpace, a software-based interaction technique that provides general one-handed thumb operation of touchscreen-based mobile devices. Our goal is to provide accurate selection of all interface objects, especially small and far targets, which are traditionally difficult to interact with using the thumb. We present the ThumbSpace design and a comparative evaluation against direct interaction for target selection. Our results show that ThumbSpace was well-received, improved accuracy for selecting targets that are out of thumb reach, and made users as effective at selecting small targets as large targets. The results further suggest user practice and design iterations hold potential to close the gap in access time between the two input methods, where ThumbSpace did not do as well as direct interaction.

There is an increasing trend in the penetration of mobile phones towards the lower strata (lower income) group of the society. Cost is perceived as the governing factor which determines the adoption of mobile phones in this group. This paper explores the effect of cost on the usage of mobile phones and proposes an enhanced design with features that optimize its usage cost for lower income group. These features help determine and restrict call duration, proactively alert user on usage deviations and avoid early call terminations. Preliminary evaluations of the enhanced design were decidedly positive about the effectiveness in controlling and optimizing mobile usage cost.

This paper presents the Button Keyboard, a very small wearable keyboard with universal usability. The Button Keyboard has high wearability and social acceptance due to its remarkably small size. As it is roughly button sized (33mm×33mm), it can be worn on the body without any discomfort. In addition, it adapts a mobile QWERTY layout to improve text entry for general users without special training. After an evaluation of the text input performance, it was found that the keyboard provides sufficient text input speed and learnability in spite of its small size. Furthermore, a touch-sensitive keypad divides input states by recognizing finger motions. Therefore, the system can provide visual or auditory

feed-forwards

to users. Thus, users can confirm the key before they execute. This previewable feature makes the keyboard a highly usable example of a wearable computer, in that it reduces the focus of attention and frequency of error. Moreover, it has the potential to assist the disabled by providing effective and appropriate ranges of feed-forwards.

We present a qualitative, exploratory study to examine the space of electronic communication (

e.g.

instant messaging, short message service, email) by Deaf teenagers in the greater Atlanta metro area. We discuss differences and similarities between deaf and hearing teen’s usage of electronic communication mediums. Five common themes:

Identity, Connection, Control, Tension,

and

Convenience

were identified from the analysis of the data collected. These themes allow us to explore electronic communication from the “use-centric” view of teenagers who are indifferent to the underlying technology supporting this communication.

TV can be regarded as the most far-reaching media in Brazil. Its presence is noticed in 90% of Brazilian homes and it is the main source of information for a major part of the population. The moment of definition and consolidation of the digital TV technology provides us with a unique opportunity for analyzing and discussing this media accessibility. Making sure that TV contents and devices are flexible enough so that people are able to perceive, understand and interact with them is a main asset for its use and an essential requirement for the democratization of information via TV broadcasting. This paper analyzes interactive digital TV accessibility in informal, formal, and technical levels, considering the Brazilian context. In addition, it presents recommendations to design accessible interfaces by referring to the W3C guidelines 2.0 for Web accessibility and specific recommendations for iDTV.

We present a study about the use of current electronic travel aids to help blind people navigate through familiar and unfamiliar environments. We also discuss the main strengths and weaknesses of electronic travel aids and propose guidelines to design and use them adequately. We provide a proposal to develop and use traveling aids. As a result, this can be a first step towards defining major aspects to develop travel aids oriented to assist mobility and orientation of blind people.

Developing countries like India are observing an increasing trend in the penetration of mobile phones towards the base of the pyramid (lower strata of the society). This segment comprises of users who are novice and semi-literate and are interested in the basic usage of the mobile phone. This paper explores one of the basic features, the

address book

for its usability and presents an enhanced

symbol-based design

to cater for the semi-literate user. The enhancement uses symbols to replace current text based storage and retrieval and also includes a call distribution based address book access to align with the skewed nature of the user’s requirements. The results of a preliminary evaluation of the prototype are encouraging regarding the value perceived through the design.

Software installation is a one-time task; yet, it should work well. Regarding assistive technologies, users with disabilities will often require help in installation tasks. Five assistive software products were evaluated in order to identify barriers faced by visually impaired users performing the installation task and none of them, for different reasons, allowed full completion of installation task. Some recommendations are devised from the experience.

User Interface (UI) plasticity denotes UI adaptation to the context of use (user, platform, physical and social environments) while preserving usability. In this article, we focus on the use of Model-Driven Engineering and demonstrate how the intrinsic flexibility of this approach can be exploited by designers for UI prototyping as well as by end-users in real settings. For doing so, the models developed at design-time, which convey high-level design decisions, are still available at run-time. As a result, an interactive system is not limited to a set of linked pieces of code, but is a graph of models that evolves, expresses and maintains multiple perspectives on the system from top-level tasks to the final UI. A simplified version of a Home Heating Control System is used to illustrate our approach and technical implementation.

The beautification of a user interface resulting from model-to-model and model-to-code transformations in Model-Driven Architecture consists of performing manual changes to address user requirements which have not been supported during the transformations. These requirements may include customization, users’ preferences, and compliance with corporate style guidelines. This paper introduces a beautification process into a user-interface model. This process includes a series of beautification operations based on a formal definition, as well as a constrained editor that enables designers to apply these beautification operations on a user interface. All manual changes done using these beautification operations are transformed into model-to-model transformations, thus reducing the problem of round-trip engineering. The paper also demonstrates that this process significantly reduces the number of manual changes performed on user interfaces of information systems, while preserving the quality properties induced by the transformations.

We propose consistency priorities to support multi-device interface design minimizing the user’s cognitive effort while performing the same task on different interfaces. The methodology is being evaluated through a framework that generates Pocket PC interfaces from desktop web pages. Initial results point to the acceptance of the approach.

Display environments for presentations are becoming diverse, and it is common to have multiple displays in the same room. We present a system to edit and give presentations using multiple displays. The main idea is to separate the content from the views. The author prepares presentation visuals (text and images) on an infinitely zoomable canvas, and then specifies what is shown in each display by dragging a rectangular display proxy onto the canvas. The presenter can change what is shown in each display by manipulating these display proxies. We describe an example that showed that the system can handle various presentation scenarios using multiple displays.

This paper proposes a pressure-sensing mouse button that can better express the user’s intention. When users use it for click or drag, the users can specify continuous parameters of the mouse operation by adjusting intensity of the button press between from lightly to strongly. For evaluating it, we conducted experiments to validate optimal number of pressure levels and to compare the mouse with conventional input methods. Subjects required significantly more time with eight pressure levels than with fewer levels. We also found that the mouse was not faster than conventional mice in terms of task performance time because users were not adept at adjusting force of the mouse button. We, therefore, suggest that an effective operation for the pressure-sensing mouse button is to change an insignificant effective parameter associated with fundamental determination of a mouse operation.

This paper describes DeskJockey, a system to provide users with additional display space by projecting information on passive physical surfaces in the environment. The current DeskJockey prototype utilizes a projected desk and allows information to be moved easily between active and passive displays using a world-in-miniature interaction metaphor. A four-week, in-situ field study was conducted to compare usage of DeskJockey with typical multiple monitor use. The results revealed potential for utilizing passive physical surfaces in this manner and demonstrated that this type of display space has distinctive affordances and benefits which enhance traditional display space.

Drag-and-guess is an extension of drag-and-drop that uses predictions which is based on application specific knowledge. As the user begins to drag an object, the system predicts the drop target and presents the result to the user. When the target is hidden in a closed folder or beneath other windows, the system makes it temporarily visible. This frees users from manual preparation such as expanding a folder tree or uncovering the target location. The user can accept the prediction by throwing the object, which then flies to the target. Or, if the prediction is unsatisfactory, the user can ignore it and perform the operation as usual. We built three prototype applications (email client, spreadsheet and overlapping windows) to show that DnG is useful in many applications. Results of the user study show that the proposed technique can improve task performance when the task is difficult to complete manually and reasonable prediction algorithm is available.

We present Wave menus, a variant of multi-stroke marking menus designed for improving the novice mode of marking while preserving their efficiency in the expert mode of marking. Focusing on the novice mode, a criteria-based analysis of existing marking menus motivates the design of Wave menus. Moreover a user experiment is presented that compares four hierarchical marking menus in novice mode. Results show that Wave and compound-stroke menus are significantly faster and more accurate than multi-stroke menus in novice mode, while it has been shown that in expert mode the multi-stroke menus and therefore the Wave menus outperform the compound-stroke menus. Wave menus also require significantly less screen space than compound-stroke menus. As a conclusion, Wave menus offer the best performance for both novice and expert modes in comparison with existing multi-level marking menus, while requiring less screen space than compound-stroke menus.

We present a work in progress that investigates the manipulation of virtual rotary knobs using a device with three degrees-of-freedom. We draw a brief parallel between handling real knobs in professional sound appliances and interacting with desktop rotary widgets. Then, we present an interaction technique aimed to support a natural mapping, to reduce the activation time, and to enhance the fluidity along the gestures that compose this activity.

This paper describes our ongoing project related to touchscreen keyboard interfaces. This customizable and adaptable touchscreen keyboard with bubble cursor-like visual feedback, CATKey, is a software keyboard for touchscreens that is designed to provide adaptable and customizable functions. We discuss its concept, prototype, and tentative evaluation.

In this article we propose a conceptual framework for associating the concepts of usability, computer education and affective quality. We analyze the interaction student-teacher under the light of learning strategies used in educational geosimulators for defining the main emotional constructs that are involved in this process. We elaborate this initial analysis by identifying which interactive objects should be associated with the identified emotional constructs. We associate these objects with an architecture that defines the basics components of an educational geosimulation system as well as the learning strategies used in this context. We illustrate the utility of the framework with an evaluation of an education geosimulator for police training as well as an evaluation of the student’s satisfaction during the interaction in different scenarios.

We examine whether or not it is possible to determine, recognize and/or report the emotional state of a group of people through touch and/or body motion. We present the initial design of a mechanism for an asynchronous yet anonymous means of communication where the basic framework is set up by defining interaction with the system and aggregating the individual interaction components. We present the results from our initial user evaluation based on a scenario-based methodology. The results prove that users tend to exhibit similar emotional expression and interaction modalities, which could be used to determine general emotional states.

This paper proposes a novel approach to modeling the diversity in users’ perceptions, based on a mixture of qualitative and quantitative techniques: the Repertory Grid Technique and Multi-Dimensional Scaling. The proposed method can be used for identifying diverse user groups that can inspire a range of personas, or for selecting subjects for field studies and usability tests. In a case study we explored the perceptions of product creators and end users towards an innovative product in its early design stage.

This paper introduces an interaction pattern approach to "engineer" motivation. Its goal is to provide concrete ideas (in the form of patterns) on how to design software that motivates its users to stay on a task. The paper presents an example of a motivating pattern, the Task Status Display (TSD), and its empirical validation. Preliminary results support its motivational effect, thereby lending support to the general notion of building motivation into interactive products for the workplace.

This paper provides support for the use of motivational needs in identifying mobile phone uses and related features. Drawing on motivational human and usage space research, the findings of interviews and surveys, this paper proposes the Mobile phone Usage Space Model (MUSM). MUSM distinguishes between two groups of features by identifying necessary and additional features, thus focusing the designer’s activity on motivational needs-driven design, rather than feature escalation that currently appears to dominate.

This paper presents a prototype of a mobile application enhancing emotional and contextual awareness in distributed knowledge work teams. Emotional, contextual, and other types of data from users are collected both implicitly and explicitly. The benefits of such a system are hypothesized to include increased individual and group awareness, emotional awareness, location- , task- and status awareness. A novel way to visualize data on location, use context, and user’s subjective emotional state on a mobile phone are also presented.

Recent developments in occlusion management for 3D environments often involve the use of dynamic transparency, or virtual “X-ray vision”, to promote target discovery and access in complex 3D worlds. However, there are many different approaches to achieving this effect and their actual utility for the user has yet to be evaluated. Furthermore, the introduction of semi-transparent surfaces adds additional visual complexity that may actually have a negative impact on task performance. In this paper, we report on an empirical user study comparing dynamic transparency to standard viewpoint controls. Our implementation of the technique is an image-space algorithm built using modern programmable shaders to achieve real-time performance and visually pleasing results. Results from the user study indicate that dynamic transparency is superior for perceptual tasks in terms of both efficiency and correctness.

Desktop environments represent a powerful user interface and have been used as the

de facto

standard human-computer interaction paradigm for over 20 years. But the rising demand of 3D applications dealing with complex datasets exceeds the capabilities of traditional interaction devices and two-dimensional displays. Such applications need more immersive and intuitive interfaces. In order to be accepted by the users, technology-driven solutions that require inconvenient instrumentation, e.g., stereo glasses or tracked gloves, should be avoided. Autostereoscopic display environments equipped with tracking systems enable humans to experience virtual 3D environments more naturally, for instance via gestures, without having to use annoying devices. However, currently these approaches are used only for specially designed or adapted applications. In this paper we introduce new 3D user interface concepts for such setups which require minimal instrumentation of the user and can be integrated easily in everyday working environments. We propose an interaction framework which supports simultaneous display of and simultaneous interaction with both monoscopic as well as stereoscopic contents. We identify the challenges for combined mouse-, keyboard- and gesture-based input paradigms in such an environment and introduce novel interaction strategies.

This paper describes exploratory studies and a formal experiment that investigate a particular temporal aspect of human pointing actions. Humans can express their intentions and refer to an external entity by pointing at distant objects with their fingers or a tool. The focus of this research is on the dwell time, the time span that people remain nearly motionless during pointing at objects. We address two questions: Is there a common or natural dwell time in human pointing actions? What implications does this have for Human Computer Interaction? Especially in virtual environments, feedback about the referred object is usually provided to the user to confirm actions such as object selection. A literature review and two studies led to a formal experiment in a hand-immersive virtual environment in search for an appropriate feedback delay time for dwell-based pointing actions. The results and implications for applications for Human Computer Interaction are discussed.

Users of three-dimensional computer-aided design (CAD) and gaming applications need to manipulate virtual objects in up to six degrees of rotational and translation freedom (DOF). To date, no 3D controller provides one-handed 6DOF input with miniature size and low cost. This paper presents a prototype of the first one-handed 6DOF motion controller suitable for use in portable platforms such as laptop computers, mobile telephones and hand-held game consoles. It is based on an optical sensor combined with novel planar spring mechanics, and can be easily manufactured using low-cost materials and processes.

It is often argued that usability problems should be identified as early as possible during software development, but many usability evaluation methods do not fit well in early development activities. We propose a method for usability evaluation of use cases, a widely used representation of design ideas produced early in software development processes. The method proceeds by systematic inspection of use cases with reference to a set of guidelines for usable design. To validate the method, four evaluators inspected a set of use cases for a health care application. The usability problems predicted by the evaluators were compared to the result of a conventional think-aloud test. About one fourth of the problems were identified by both think-aloud testing and use case inspection; about half of the predicted problems not found by think-aloud testing were assessed as providing useful input to early development. Qualitative data on the evaluators’ experience using the method are also presented. On this background, we argue that use case inspection has a promising potential and discuss its limitations.

Many software applications continue to grow in terms of the number of features they offer. Reduced-functionality interfaces have been proposed as a solution by several researchers, but evaluations have been limited in number and scope. We argue that traditional performance measures are not sufficient for these interfaces, so we introduce and distinguish feature findability and feature awareness measures. We have conducted a controlled study that demonstrates the tradeoff between these two measures: findability in a minimal layered approach was better than in the full interface alone, but subjects were more aware of advanced features if they used the full interface from the outset. A marked layered approach was also evaluated, but provided little benefit over the other interfaces. Ours is also the first experiment comparing more than one multi-layer approach to a control interface.

We present a methodological variation of cultural probing called playful probing. In playful probing games are developed according to the area investigated, to enhance participants’ involvement in the studies. The games are used as additional probing material and enhance participants’ involvement. Based on an experimental case study with 40 households participating in a ethnographic study on new forms of media usage in the home context we show how playful probing can successful support users’ engagement during the ethnographic study. We found interesting insights, for example the amount of data provided on creative cards doubled for households using the playful probing approach compared to households not using playful probing. Thus the methodological extension seems worth the effort when used in ethnographic studies within the home context.

This paper examines the use of surveys in measuring privacy concerns in ubiquitous computing environments. Two evaluation techniques are used to study the privacy concerns of sharing context information: a paper based survey and in-situ questionnaires. Results from the two techniques differ significantly, suggesting that surveys are not reliable in predicting privacy concerns regarding context-aware services. Further, the surveys are not consistently biased; for some information, people shared more in-situ than they predicted they would share in the survey, while for other types, they shared less.

The use of RFID technology in HCI research is emerging. We identify its promising application in the healthcare sector by empowering the process of capturing, extracting and analyzing data, which help understand task patterns underlying human errors and other intriguing phenomena. RFID and video as research tools are compared to identify their strengths and weaknesses. RFID can be cost-effective and powerful, especially when combined with the hospital information system and optionally with video analysis.

Industrial usability work often fails to produce the expected impact on software products even though significant resources have been used on uncovering problems and suggesting improvements. So, it seems that feedback from industrial usability work lacks persuasiveness, i.e. it fails to convince the key stakeholders that actions need to be taken. This study reports from interviews with 26 stakeholders in software development projects. Our data suggests that the interviewees address usability using different perspectives and based on our observations we describe five such perspectives. Further, we discuss how applying different usability perspectives might inform the persuasiveness of usability work.