Human-computer Interaction Community Research Articles

Research on 3D International River Visualization Simulation Based on Human-Computer Interaction

With the development of digitalization in various fields, the water conservancy field is gradually developing digital three-dimensional visualization research to promote the development of digital watershed construction. This paper deeply analyzes and discusses the theory and application of three-dimensional visualization of river water scenes and realizes an interactive visual simulation system based on virtual reality technology, which simulates simulation and operation management, which can greatly accelerate the data. The processing speed makes the huge data be effectively utilized to provide visual interaction means for numerical simulation and data analysis, improve the efficiency of numerical calculation, and realize human-computer interaction communication, so that people can observe the phenomena and laws that are difficult to observe by traditional methods. The rationality of the mathematical model is analyzed for effectiveness.

Revisited: Comparison of Empirical Methods to Evaluate Visualizations Supporting Crafting and Assembly Purposes.

Ubiquitous, situated, and physical visualizations create entirely new possibilities for tasks contextualized in the real world, such as doctors inserting needles. During the development of situated visualizations, evaluating visualizations is a core requirement. However, performing such evaluations is intrinsically hard as the real scenarios are safety-critical or expensive to test. To overcome these issues, researchers and practitioners adapt classical approaches from ubiquitous computing and use surrogate empirical methods such as Augmented Reality (AR), Virtual Reality (VR) prototypes, or merely online demonstrations. This approach's primary assumption is that meaningful insights can also be gained from different, usually cheaper and less cumbersome empirical methods. Nevertheless, recent efforts in the Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) community have found evidence against this assumption, which would impede the use of surrogate empirical methods. Currently, these insights rely on a single investigation of four interactive objects. The goal of this work is to investigate if these prior findings also hold for situated visualizations. Therefore, we first created a scenario where situated visualizations support users in do-it-yourself (DIY) tasks such as crafting and assembly. We then set up five empirical study methods to evaluate the four tasks using an online survey, as well as VR, AR, laboratory, and in-situ studies. Using this study design, we conducted a new study with 60 participants. Our results show that the situated visualizations we investigated in this study are not prone to the same dependency on the empirical method, as found in previous work. Our study provides the first evidence that analyzing situated visualizations through different empirical (surrogate) methods might lead to comparable results.

Perceived usability evaluation of Microsoft Teams as an online learning platform during COVID-19 using system usability scale and technology acceptance model in India.

The COVID-19 pandemic has resulted in a physical shutdown of all types of educational institutes worldwide due to which the education delivery has now shifted to an "online only" exclusivity model. In this perspective, perceived usability of the online learning platforms that are currently being used is an important aspect, especially due to the absence of any physical classes. In this work Microsoft Teams is used as the reference platform for which the perceived usability is evaluated. For the evaluation purpose a dual strategy is followed by using the System Usability Scale (SUS), which is a Human Computer Interaction (HCI) based approach, and the Technology Acceptance Model (TAM), which is an Information Systems (IS) based approach. Although both these instruments are popular in their respective domains, yet they have not been considered simultaneously in one work for the purpose of usability evaluation. By doing so, this work attempts to streamline and unify the process of usability evaluation. Results that are obtained from a large-scale survey of university students show the similarity and equivalency between the two methodologies, with the Perceived Ease of Use (PEOU) construct of TAM having greater similarity with SUS. Moreover, this work also considers the digital-divide aspect (mobile vs. web environment) that is prevalent particularly in developing countries like India, and whether it has any effect on the perceived usability. Results show that the consumption platform does not have any effect on the usability aspect.

SMELL SPACE

The human sense of smell is powerful. However, the way we use smell as an interaction modality in human–computer interaction (HCI) is limited. We lack a common reference point to guide designers’ choices when using smell. Here, we map out an olfactory design space to provide designers with such guidance. We identified four key design features: (i) chemical, (ii) emotional, (iii) spatial, and (iv) temporal. Each feature defines a building block for smell-based interaction design and is grounded in a review of the relevant scientific literature. We then demonstrate the design opportunities in three application cases. Each application (i.e., one desktop, two virtual reality implementations) highlights the design choices alongside the implementation and evaluation possibilities in using smell. We conclude by discussing how identifying those design features facilitates a healthy growth of this research domain and contributes to an intermediate-level knowledge space. Finally, we discuss further challenges the HCI community needs to tackle.

RADAR: automated task planning for proactive decision support

ABSTRACT Proactive Decision Support aims at improving the decision making experience of human decision-makers by enhancing the quality of the decisions and the ease of making them. Given that AI techniques are efficient in searching over a potentially large solution space (of decision) and finding good solutions, it can be used for human-in-the-loop scenarios such as disaster response that demand naturalistic decision making. A human decision-maker, in such scenarios, may experience high-cognitive overload leading to a loss of situational awareness. In this paper, we propose the use of automated task-planning techniques coupled with design principles laid out in the Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) community for developing a proactive decision support system. To this extent, we highlight the capabilities of such a system RADAR and briefly, describe how automated planning techniques help us in providing the varying degrees of assistance. To evaluate the effectiveness of the different capabilities, we conduct ablation studies with human subjects on a synthetic environment for making an interactive plan of study. We found that planning techniques like plan validation and suggestions help to reduce planning time (objective metrics) and improves user satisfaction (subjective metrics) compared to expert human planners without any support.

User Representations in Human-Computer Interaction

ABSTRACT Cursors, avatars, virtual hands or tools, and other rendered graphical objects, enable users to interact with computers such as PCs, game consoles or virtual reality systems. We analyze the role of these various objects from a user perspective under the unifying concept of “User Representations”. These representations are virtual objects that artificially extend the users’ physical bodies, enabling them to manipulate the virtual environment by performing motor actions that are continuously mapped to their User Representations. In this paper, we identify a set of concepts that are relevant for different User Representations, and provide a multidisciplinary review of the multisensory and cognitive factors underlying the control and subjective experience of User Representations. These concepts include visual appearance, multimodal feedback, sense of agency, input methods, peripersonal space, visual perspective, and body ownership. We further suggest a research agenda for these concepts, which can lead the human-computer interaction community towards a wider perspective of how users perceive and interact through their User Representations.

A Data-Driven Introduction to Authors, Readings, and Techniques in Visualization for the Digital Humanities.

The newly rediscovered frontier between data visualization and the digital humanities has proven to be an exciting field of experimentation for scholars from both disciplines. This fruitful collaboration is attracting researchers from other areas of science who may be willing to create visual analysis tools that promote humanities research in its many forms. However, as the collaboration grows in complexity, it may become intimidating for these scholars to get engaged in the discipline. To facilitate this task, we have built an introduction to visualization for the digital humanities that sits on a data-driven stance adopted by the authors. In order to construct a dataset representative of the discipline, we analyze citations from a core corpus on 300 publications in visualization for the humanities obtained from recent editions of the InfoVis Vis4DH workshop, the ADHO Digital Humanities Conference, and the specialized digital humanities journal Digital Humanities Quarterly. From here, we extract referenced works and analyze more than 1900 publications in search of citation patterns, prominent authors in the field, and other interesting insights. Finally, following the path set by other researchers in the visualization and Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) communities, we analyze paper keywords to identify significant themes and research opportunities in the field.

Adding Culture to UX

For more than a decade, User eXperience (UX) has grown into a core concept of Human--Computer Interaction (HCI) and has been widely disseminated and accepted in the HCI community. At the same time, Cultural Heritage (CH) has been a favored domain for UX research, while the visitor is able to exploit CH material before, during, and after the visit, having different goals and requirements in each phase. Thus, CH organisations need to carefully explore the potential of investing in UX, as visitor satisfaction and intention to return and spread positive word-of-mouth is closely linked to the destination's overall success. A multitude of methods for UX analysis exist, but a clear overview of the current state of the available UX research methods in CH is missing. Recent studies [Othman 2012; Roussou 2018] have successfully developed frameworks to measure UX in cultural spaces, but most of them still lack understanding about how visitors interact with new technologies and simultaneously with the exhibits. In this article, a survey that describes the conceptual frameworks, models, research methodologies, and paradigms of incorporating Cultural User eXperience (CUX) in applications is reported, as well as the overall interaction between UX and CH and the related aspects that are influenced by the CH application domain and the parameters leading to optimization of the CUX. The outcome of this survey lays ground for understanding and defining the concept of UX research in CH, while current challenges and issues for future work are discussed.

Agency of Autistic Children in Technology Research—A Critical Literature Review

Autistic children are increasingly a focus of technology research within the Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) community. We provide a critical review of the purposes of these technologies and how they discursively conceptualise the agency of autistic children. Through our analysis, we establish six categories of these purposes: behaviour analysis, assistive technologies, education, social skills, therapy and well-being. Further, our discussion of these purposes shows how the technologies embody normative expectations of a neurotypical society, which predominantly views autism as a medical deficit in need of ‘correction’. Autistic children—purportedly the beneficiaries of these technologies—thus become a secondary audience to the largely externally defined purposes. We identify a lack of design for technologies that are geared towards the interests, needs and desires of autistic children. To move HCI’s research into autism beyond this, we provide guidance on how to consider agency in use and explicitly allow for appropriation beyond externally driven goals.

Tangibly understanding intangible complexities: Designing for distributed autonomous organizations

Abstract New digital technologies such as Blockchain and smart contracting are rapidly changing the face of value exchange, and present new opportunities and challenges for designers. Designers and data specialists are at the forefront of exploring new ways of exchanging value, using Blockchain, cryptocurrencies, smart contracting and the direct exchanges between things made possible by the Internet of Things (Tallyn et al. 2018; Pschetz et al. 2019). For researchers and designers in areas of Human Computer Interaction (HCI) and Interaction Design to better understand and explore the implications of these emerging and future technologies as Distributed Autonomous Organisations (DAOs) we delivered a workshop at the ACM conference Designing Interactive Systems (DIS) in Edinburgh in 2017 (Nissen et al. 2017). The workshop aimed to use the lens of DAOs to introduce the principle that products and services may soon be owned and managed collectively and not by one person or authority, thus challenging traditional concepts of ownership and power. This workshop builds on established HCI research exploring the role of technology in financial interactions and designing for the rapidly changing world of technology and value exchange (Kaye et al. 2014; Malmborg et al. 2015; Millen et al. 2015; Vines et al. 2014). Beyond this, the HCI community has started to explore these technologies beyond issues of finance, money and collaborative practice, focusing on the implications of these emerging but rapidly ascending distributed systems in more applied contexts (Elsden et al. 2018a). By bringing together designers and researchers with different experiences and knowledge of distributed systems, the aim of this workshop was two-fold. First, to further understand, develop and critique these new forms of distributed power and ownership and second, to practically explore how to design interactive products and services that enable, challenge or disrupt existing and emerging models.

Design fictions for learning: A method for supporting students in reflecting on technology in Human-Computer Interaction courses

Design fictions describe non-existing prototype devices and services, encouraging reflection on technology matters. However, until now most of the fictional design work has been carried out either by “experts” to foster critical thinking within the Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) community, or by user groups to mostly define requirements for creating novel devices. In this article, we aim to use design fictions as a method for supporting students in thinking of the assumptions and consequences of emerging technologies. We report a multi-year experience in using fictional design in the context of academic education to show that such method can be employed to both teach fundamental elements of technology design and HCI and, at the same time, elicit a critical thinking, helping students reflect on the ramifications of their creations and their role as designers. We discuss the methodological implications, pointing out the opportunities this method opens as well as its weaknesses. Finally, we propose a series of methodological suggestions addressed to facilitate the use of design fictions as a “tool for reflection.”

Design Insights from the Implementation of a Student Result Processing System in Nigeria

The design of digital technologies is often influenced by the infrastructural, economic, and social realities of the environment of the designer. Thus, the Human Computer Interaction (HCI) community emphasize various strategies to learn from and about target users (Brown et al., 2010). However, products that are designed with the amount of detail recommended by the HCI community require a significant amount of time, energy and skill and as a result are expensive. The high cost of these services force individuals and organizations to resort to commercial products and it is often the case that commercial products that are successful for one group of people might be unsuitable for another (Johns et al., 2002). To address this problem, user groups often adapt the technology to suit their needs, use the technology in unintended ways or ultimately reject them. In this paper we present a case-study where locally developed technology was preferred over commercial solutions. We draw design insights from this experience on how we might design educational technologies while considering the culture of the target users. Keywords: Education, Result computation in Higher Education, Educational Software Tools, Digital Tools in Higher Education DOI : 10.7176/DCS/9-8-05 Publication date : August 31st 2019

A Speculative Feminist Approach to Project Management

In this paper, we discuss how taking a speculative feminist approach, as proposed by some members of the human-computer interaction (HCI) community, results in a radically different design of software for project management. As we interpret it, speculative feminist design in HCI demonstrates attention to the following six principles: challenging the status quo; designing for an actionable ideal; searching out the invisible; considering the micro, meso, and macro; privileging transparency; and welcoming critique. In the context of project management, our approach to software design has therefore included the following priorities: all stakeholders have goals, but not necessarily shared goals; the line between an internal deliverable and an external project outcome is blurred; impacts can occur immediately or decades later; impact assessment methods need to be explicit in the project planning system. In adopting the terms speculative feminism and critical feminism, we intend that our work be understood as situated within the territory of Critical Theory as applied particularly to the work of the Frankfurt School. We introduce our design, called It’s a Wicked World (IWW), as an example, although it is only the current iteration of one part of a larger, ongoing project.

From rituals to magic: Interactive art and HCI of the past, present, and future

The connection between art and technology is much tighter than is commonly recognized. The emergence of aesthetic computing in the early 2000s has brought renewed focus on this relationship. In this article, we articulate how art and Human–Computer Interaction (HCI) are compatible with each other and actually essential to advance each other in this era, by briefly addressing interconnected components in both areas—interaction, creativity, embodiment, affect, and presence. After briefly introducing the history of interactive art, we discuss how art and HCI can contribute to one another by illustrating contemporary examples of art in immersive environments, robotic art, and machine intelligence in art. Then, we identify challenges and opportunities for collaborative efforts between art and HCI. Finally, we reiterate important implications and pose future directions. This article is intended as a catalyst to facilitate discussions on the mutual benefits of working together in the art and HCI communities. It also aims to provide artists and researchers in this domain with suggestions about where to go next.

Technology-assisted reconstruction: a new alternative to the experience sampling method

ABSTRACT Despite the recent increase in interest in the experience sampling method (ESM), researchers have repeatedly criticised the high burden and levels of interruption that it imposes on participants, and alternative cost-effective methods, such as the Day Reconstruction Method (DRM), have been adopted by the Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) community. In this paper, we review the use of ESM and DRM in the HCI field and argue for a new paradigm called Technology-Assisted Reconstruction (TAR), according to which passively logged data of users’ behaviours are used in assisting the later reconstruction of experiences and behaviours. We discuss five methods of Technology-Assisted Reconstruction that we have developed in our past work and conclude with a framework that highlights three directions for Technology-Assisted Reconstruction.

Toward Device-Free Micro-Gesture Tracking via Accurate Acoustic Doppler-Shift Detection

As a universal interaction method, hand and finger gestures can express people’s intention directly and clearly in daily life, and has been one of the hotspots in human–computer interaction community. In this paper, we present <italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">DMT</i> , a device-free finger gesture tracking system that can track and recognize the finger motion accurately. To achieve this, we transform the mobile device, such as a smart phone, into an active sonar system by establishing inaudible audio links between the built-in speakers and microphone. The finger motion will have an effect (e.g., Doppler-shift) on the audio signals, which makes it possible to track the finger motion according to the received signal characteristics at the microphone side. Due to the small reflection energy and slow moving speed of the finger, the existing methods cannot detect the Doppler-shift accurately. To this end, a Fourier fitting-based method is proposed in the <italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">DMT</i> to accurately detect the Doppler-shift. With the detected Doppler-shift, the <italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">DMT</i> can track the finger motion with high accuracy. The <italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">DMT</i> supports all kinds of finger gestures interaction, including characters and shapes. Extensive experiments demonstrate the high accuracy and robustness of the <italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">DMT</i> in dynamic environments.

Self-monitoring of blood glucose: The user experience and device interactions of older adults with type 2 diabetes mellitus

In Mexico, the Type 2 Diabetes mellitus (DM2) is a public health problem and causes early mortality. The highest prevalence is in the elderly population, between 60 and 79 years. Adherence to the treatment and the self-monitoring of blood glucose is often poor. For patients with DM2, the self-monitoring of blood glucose is a useful tool in the management of this chronic condition because it helps to establish a profile of blood glucose levels and to know how the patient is responding to nutrition and pharmacotherapy. This project is being developed with the aim to identify the requirements of older adults with diabetes mellitus type 2 for the use of the glucometer. It will be carried out clinician interviews and individual trials with older adults who suffer this illness. This paper also aims to share a learning experience with the Human-Computer Interaction community working within the medical device industry.

Recommending Queries by Extracting Thematic Experiences from Complex Search Tasks.

Since complex search tasks are usually divided into subtasks, providing subtask-oriented query recommendations is an effective way to support complex search tasks. Currently, most subtask-oriented query recommendation methods extract subtasks from plain form search logs consisting of only queries and clicks, providing limited clues to identify subtasks. Meanwhile, for several decades, the Computer Human Interface (CHI)/Human Computer Interaction (HCI) communities have been working on new complex search tools for the purpose of supporting rich user interactions beyond just queries and clicks, and thus providing rich form search logs with more clues for subtask identification. In this paper, we researched the provision of subtask-oriented query recommendations by extracting thematic experiences from the rich form search logs of complex search tasks logged in a proposed visual data structure. We introduce the tree structure of the visual data structure and propose a visual-based subtask identification method based on the visual data structure. We then introduce a personalized PageRank-based method to recommend queries by ranking nodes on the network from the identified subtasks. We evaluated the proposed methods in experiments consisting of informative and tentative search tasks.

Evaluating Affective User-Centered Design of Video Games Using Qualitative Methods

In recent years, researchers and practitioners in the human-computer interaction (HCI) community have placed a lot of focus in developing methods and processes for use in the gaming field. Affective user-centered design (AUCD) plays an important role in the game industry because it promotes emotional and mental communication, hence improving the interaction modes between users and video games. This paper looks at the development of a suitable AUCD guideline to determine if the expressed emotion, semantics, and mental concept of a tangible and intangible video gaming interface are well received by its intended users. Approaching AUCD in video games requires investigating multiple data to obtain a reliable data especially when assessing and interpreting affect and emotion. They present a challenge due to many ambiguities related to affect definition and measuring affective emotion can be very tedious due to its complexity and unpredictability. In this paper, we describe the methods and techniques used to assess affective user-centered design in video games. We also discuss our approaches within the context of existing affective gaming and user-centered design theory and data gathering procedures, including the factors affecting internal and external validity and the data analysis techniques.

Social Game Elements in World of Warcraft: Interpersonal Relations, Groups, and Organizations for Gamification Design

ABSTRACTDespite the growing interest for gamification research within the Human–Computer interaction community, gamification techniques still suffer from a limited availability of game elements to be employed in design practices. Researchers and practitioners are anchored to the use of points, badges, and leaderboards, rarely introducing novel design solutions coming from games. In this article, I propose to look at World of Warcraft (WoW) to find insights for designing novel online communities based on gamified features. By exploring through an ethnographic work how WoW “shapes” its players’ social relations and how specific “social game elements” impact on their subjective experiences, I will propose a series of design suggestions that could be employed to “enhance” the user experience within online communities in domain as diverse as learning, fitness, and crowdsourcing.