Retail experiences in the Metaverse are becoming increasingly popular, driven by a business model that relies on brand engagement and user-generated virtual worlds (UGVWs).While much attention has been given to ideal design patterns for enhancing user engagement, there is a need for a critical examination of pain points that negatively impact their virtual product experiences.This study introduces anti-experiences as a methodological contribution, using speculative design to deliberately explore undesirable design elements and highlight engagement barriers in these virtual product experiences.Through group co-design and storyboarding, we conducted workshops with 30 participants using the Roblox platform as a case study, including XR designers, physical-world designers, and non-users of the Metaverse.Through this process, participants identified three key pain points: (1) missing diegetic elements, (2) fragmented social interactions, and (3) navigational ambiguity.By developing anti-design storyboards, participants critically examined how these pain points affect user engagement and satisfaction, uncovering potential risks and limitations of current Metaverse retail experiences.From these findings, we propose three key design insights to enhance virtual shopping environments: (1) Introducing play and balancing risk, (2) Shopping together between realities, (3) Orchestrating sensory richness and subtlety.

This paper presents a systematic review of online health communities (OHCs) published between 2009 and 2020 in the ACM Digital Library. Aiming to consolidate the current issues, design knowledge, challenges, and tensions in OHCs, our analysis identified four high-level aspects related to the use and design of OHCs: (1) temporal: OHCs as transition spaces, (2) spatial: bridging experiential knowledge with medical expertise, (3) technological: exchanging and locating peer support, and (4) tension dimensions in OHCs. We further discuss methodological improvements and computing opportunities for OHC research and how to increase OHC members’ agency in such a medically dominated context. These findings have the potential to inform future OHC designs and help researchers and designers position future contributions.

It is common not be fully aware of our experience of emotions, and sometimes it is hard to communicate our emotions to others. Using design strategies derived from ambiguity and performativity, we came up with the concept of Isles of Emotion, customizable abstract virtual spaces that represent emotions. Considering remote communication as one of the potential use cases, we assessed this concept as an emotional reflection and communication tool via user studies conducted with 6 pairs of closely related people who have lived apart in the near past. During the studies participants created their own emotion islands using VR tools and visited their own and their pair’s islands. We contribute to the existing literature by sharing resulting design insights on emotionally expressive social virtual spaces, commenting on the level of abstraction from and connections to the real-world, sharing and collaboration concerning the islands and their customizability.

Self-reflection is evaluation of one’s inferential processes often triggered by complex social and emotional experiences, characterized by their ambiguity and unpredictability, pushing one to re-interpret the experience, and update existing knowledge. Using immersive Virtual Reality (VR), we aimed to support social and emotional learning (SEL) through reflection in psychology education. We used the case of psychosis as it involves ambiguous perceptual experiences. With a codesign workshop, we designed a VR prototype that simulates the perceptual, cognitive, affective, and social elements of psychotic experiences, followed by a user-study with psychology students to evaluate the potential of this technology to support reflection. Our analyses suggested that technology-mediated reflection in SEL involves two dimensions: spontaneous perspective-taking and shared state of affect. By exploring the subjective qualities of reflection with the said dimensions, our work contributes to the literature on technology-supported learning and VR developers designing for reflection.

Understanding different types of users' needs can even be more critical in today's data visualization field, as exploratory visualizations for novice users are becoming more widespread with an increasing amount of data sources. The complexity of data-driven projects requires input from including interdisciplinary expert and novice users. Our work- shop framework helps taking design decisions collaboratively with experts and novice users, on different levels such as outlining users and goals, identifying tasks, structuring data, and creating data visualization ideas. We conducted workshops for two different data visualization projects. For each project, we conducted a workshop with project stakeholders who are domain experts, then a second workshop with novice users. We collected feedback from participants and used critical reflection on the process. Later on, we created recommendations on how this workshop structure can be used by others. Our main contributions are, (1) the workshop framework for designing data visualizations, (2) describing the outcomes and lessons learned from multiple workshops.

Autism is a complex, life-long condition that manifests itself in unique ways in each person. Due to the complexity of the condition along with not having efficient and immediate social support, parents with autistic children often seek for and rely upon the information generated by the community (parents, caregivers, autistics and experts) on online platforms. We look into what parents of autistic individuals discuss on an online platform in Turkey, how they practice autism online and why those practices are important or relevant. Our findings show how parents cope with understanding and defining autism, and how they seek for empowering each other, and managing the everyday collectively under a dominant medical discourse around autism in Turkish context. Based on our findings, we extend the existing knowledge on collective and alternative ways of re-defining autism as lived experience and introduce recommendations on how those strategies can be integrated to design.

The design space of social drones, where autonomous flyers operate in close proximity to human users or bystanders, is distinct from use cases involving a remote human operator and/or an uninhabited environment; and warrants foregrounding human-centered design concerns. Recently, research on social drones has followed a trend of rapid growth. This paper consolidates the current state of the art in human-centered design knowledge about social drones through a review of relevant studies, scaffolded by a descriptive framework of design knowledge creation. Our analysis identified three high-level themes that sketch out knowledge clusters in the literature, and twelve design concerns which unpack how various dimensions of drone aesthetics and behavior relate to pertinent human responses. These results have the potential to inform and expedite future research and practice, by supporting readers in defining and situating their future contributions. The materials and results of our analysis are also published in an open online repository that intends to serve as a living hub for a community of researchers and designers working with social drones.

This paper explores the contrasting notions of "permanance and disposability," "the digital and the physical," and "symbolism and function" in the context of interaction design. Drawing from diverse streams of knowledge, we describe a novel design direction for enduring computational heirlooms based on the marriage of decentralized, trustless software and durable mobile hardware. To justify this concept, we review prior research; attempt to redefine the notion of "material;" propose blockchain-based software as a particular digital material to serve as a substrate for computational heirlooms; and argue for the use of mobile artifacts, informed in terms of their materials and formgiving practices by mechanical wristwatches, as its physical embodiment and functional counterpart. This integration is meant to enable mobile and ubiquitous interactive systems for the storing, experiencing, and exchanging value throughout multiple human lifetimes; showcasing the feats of computational sciences and crafts; and enabling novel user experiences.

To date, developmental needs and abilities of children under 4 years old have been insufficiently taken into account at the early stages of technology design. Bekker and Antle [6] created developmentally situated design (DSD) cards as a design tool to inform children's technology designers about children's development starting from 5 years of age. In this paper, we describe how we customized DSD cards for a specific developmental skill (i.e., spatial learning) of children between 2- and 4-year-olds for tangible interaction design. The cards were evaluated after a user study in which 19 participants from different backgrounds used the cards in three design workshops. Our analysis of observational notes and online survey identify and discuss how specific card features support or limit use by our participants. We draw on our findings to set forth design considerations and possible refinements that make age specific knowledge about very young children's spatial learning to inform technologies based on tangible interaction.

Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is a neurodevelopmental disorder characterized by various sensory perceptual and cognitive issues that lead to far-reaching challenges in autistics' social and daily lives. Research in HCI is inclined to take an important role in providing support to autistic individuals. However, due to the sensitivity of this user population and the HCI research community's lack of experience in working with neurodiverse users, researchers struggle while conducting and reporting on user studies with autistics. Aiming at analyzing autistics' involvement in design processes and the struggles encountered, here we present a critical review of user experience studies with autistic users conducted between 2010 and 2016. Using qualitative and quantitative approaches together, we revealed common practices and major problems. We provide a two-fold contribution to the HCI field: A guideline for conducting studies with users with autism as well as suggestions on how to report these studies.

Recent research has focused on how to facilitate interaction between humans and robots, giving rise to the field of human robot interaction. A related research area is human-drone interaction (HDI), investigating how interaction between humans and drones can be expanded in novel and meaningful ways. In this work, we explore the use of drones as companions in a home environment. We present three consecutive studies addressing user requirements and design space of companion drones. Following a user-centered approach, the three stages include online questionnaire, design workshops, and simulated virtual reality (VR) home environment. Our results show that participants preferred the idea of a drone companion at home, particularly for tasks such as fetching items and cleaning. The participants were also positive towards a drone companion that featured anthropomorphic features.

We present ViewFinder, a cross-platform mobile application to support the installation and reconfiguration of marker-based motion capture systems with multiple cameras. ViewFinder addresses a common issue when installing or reconfiguring motion capture systems: that system components such as cameras and the host computer can be physically separate and/or difficult to reach, requiring personnel to maneuver between them frequently and laboriously. ViewFinder allows setup technicians or end-users to visualize the output of each camera in the system in a variety of ways in real time, on a smartphone or tablet, while also providing a means to make adjustments to system parameters such as exposure or marker thresholds on the fly. The app has been designed and evaluated through a process observing user-centered design principles, and effectively reduces the amount of work involved in installing and reconfiguring motion capture systems.

This paper speculates and explores how emotional awareness and communication can be enhanced with the mediation of spatial experience. Based on two exploratory user studies, we designed and prototyped a conceptual system that mediates the spatial attributes of the surroundings according to user's choices and their emotional state. We then conducted user studies with the prototype. We contribute to existing literature by sharing our insights into potential use cases and implications of an emotionally responsive space.

This proposed project aims to develop a research-driven interactive product that facilitates spatial skills of preschoolers. Here, we present the preliminary qualitative results of a user study with the paper prototype of Fungram, merging physical tangram pieces on the screen within a narrative context. A pilot study was conducted with eight children between the ages of 25 and 48 months, who were presented tangible tangram pieces along with two sets of papers with and without narrative context. Our preliminary qualitative data indicates that narrative context helps children's coherence of abstract figures and triggers rotation of geometric tangram pieces. This study provide insights about children's user needs and action strategies within the proposed use scenario with graspable puzzle pieces related to screen interaction at this age range. We suggest that transmedia play expand opportunities for children to employ their spatial skills in different settings.