Abstract Main streets and traffic thoroughfares are difficult public spaces to “humanize” as they are home to intense multisensory interactions between traffic, people, and place. In current practice, urban designers assess people’s feelings of safety and amenability of streetscapes either in situ or using paper-based methods to present alternatives. This study demonstrates the role HCI methods can play in increasing flexibility, accessibility, and inclusivity in evaluating alternative urban streetscape elements using virtual environments and remote evaluation. Using HCI methods, we can measure user experience in the virtual environment while gathering perceptions on safety and amenity of different urban elements. Using an interactive 360-degree video embedded in an online survey, we collected data on usability, user experience, and affective responses to alternative streetscape designs. Our findings show that the online survey generated useful data on perceptions of pedestrian-oriented streetscape interventions. We argue that in validating the positive user experience of the virtual environment, we increase urban designer confidence in the quality of responses toward informing design of real-world safe and amenable streets. Our contribution demonstrates that HCI methods can be used to help create a new, flexible, far-reaching, and effective approach for gathering community feedback on future urban designs.

Commercialised voice user interface devices for the home, like Amazon Echo, Google Home, and Apple HomePod, with integrated digital personal assistants have rapidly grown in popularity. These devices embody intelligent software agents that support users in their everyday life through easy and intuitive conversational interactions. While their use in everyday activities is largely unexplored, the proliferation in home use presents a valuable opportunity to add to understanding around the use of in-home digital personal assistants. In this paper, we investigate their home use in a broad context to learn more about people’s experiences, attitudes, interactions and expectations with these devices contributing new insights to current knowledge around this use. Applying the digital ethnography method, we collected 3542 reviews and comments about Amazon Echo, Google Home, and Apple HomePod on Amazon, eBay, and Reddit. Six main themes and 29 categories were derived through filtering, thematic analysis and affinity diagramming. These findings constitute a conceptual framework characterising the current landscape of home use of digital personal assistants. Additionally, we identify and discuss unique issues discovered around the invisible interface, interactive freedom, and creative appropriation. We use our findings to propose implications for interaction design of DPAs for home use.

Digital personal assistants (DPAs) have recently grown in popularity because they are both a commercially available new technology and reasonably affordable to the average household. This opens opportunities for new ways to assist people in everyday activities in their homes through voice-interaction. Physical activity has significant health benefits, and yet globally, 1 in 4 adults are not active enough. To address this, we investigate the persuasive potential of DPAs in increasing people’s physical activity at home. We conducted a study with 48 participants to understand the effect of applying three of Fogg’s persuasive principles to the design of a DPA exercise programme: Suggestion, Virtual Reward, and Praise. Our findings show that DPAs have the potential, within their current technical and reactive capabilities, to persuade people to increase their physical activity at home, using Suggestion to encourage physical effort, Virtual Reward to encourage endurance, and Praise to create reassurance for beginners. Based on this, we offer three alternate perspectives for developing persuasive DPAs. We also discuss limitations of the study and suggest future research directions around using persuasion with DPAs.

Mobile devices are fast becoming an integral part of family life. While mobile technology provides constant connectivity to a world outside the home, it inevitably disrupts family dynamics and the social notion of being together. In this paper, we explore "non-use" of mobile technology in a family setting. To do this, we designed the Pup-Lock provotype, a design provocation intended to challenge established expectations and practices around mobile device use at home. We report on a five-week in-depth study of using Pup-Lock with three families reflecting on their mobile device usage and their experience of non-use. Our findings illustrate how mobile use shapes social expectations and how over-use creates tensions in families. We contribute by showing how provoking non-use through design results in desirable and meaningful ways to increase family interaction. We discuss implications of designing for non-use to challenge established domestic practices around technology use.

Since the emergence of video computer games in the early 70's, the concept of "cheating" has been a hot issue in video gaming research. Adding mobility and location-based capabilities to computer games introduces a whole new set of behaviours, motivations and justifications that challenge gaming communities to reconsider what constitutes "cheating", and what is simply an acceptable extension of game play. Using the specific case of Pokémon GO, we investigate players' perceptions on cheating in this mobile location-based game. In our research, we identified 10 ways that players circumvent the rules of Pokémon GO. Through analysis of online forums, field observations, interviews, and a focus group with local players, we realised that players' attitudes vary as to what constitutes "cheating", and whether playing outside the rules is acceptable. We found players "cheat" to enhance game experience, to compensate for limitations in the game's design, or to keep up with other cheaters. While this has been observed in online gaming before, our study contributes to research by relating these specifically to the game's mobile location-based nature. We offer implications for design of location-based games.

There is a growing interest in HCI research to explore cross-device interaction, giving rise to an interest in different approaches facilitating interaction between handheld devices and large displays. Contributing to this, we have investigated the use of four existing approaches combining touch and mid-air gestures, pinching, swiping, swinging and flicking. We look specifically at their relative efficiency, effectiveness and accuracy in bi-directional interaction between a smartphone and large display in a point-click context. We report findings from two user studies, which show that swiping is both most effective, fastest and most accurate, closely followed by swinging. What these two approaches have in common is the ability to keep the pointer steady on the large display, unaffected by concurrent gestures or body movements used to complete the interaction, suggesting that this is an important factor for designing effective cross-device interaction with large displays.

Discovering activities in the city around you can be difficult with traditional search engines unless you know what you are looking for. Searching for inspiration on things to do requires a more open-ended and explorative approach. We introduce transitory search as a dynamic way of uncovering information about activities in the city around you that allows the user to start from a vague idea of what they are interested in, and iteratively modify their search using slider continuums to discover best-fit results. We present the design of a smartphone app exemplifying the idea of transitory search and give results from a lab evaluation and a 4-week field deployment involving 15 people in two different cities. Our findings indicate that transitory search on a mobile device both supports discovering activities in the city and more interestingly helps users reflect on and shape their preferences in situ. We also found that ambiguous slider continuums work well as people happily form and refine individual interpretations of them.

Over the past decade we have seen an increased awareness about domestic energy consumption and a growing focus on eco-feedback displays. In this paper we explore the concept of providing forecasts in such displays as a supplement to information about past usage. Our prototype, eForecast, extends the display of past electricity usage with forecasts about expected usage, electricity price, availability of wind power, and expected demand drops and peaks. Building on previous eco-feedback display research, our approach specifically enables people to use electricity at more opportune times -- when it is cheap, green, or when there is an abundance of capacity. We evaluated eForecast in real world use in three domestic households for 22 weeks, where we explored potentials and limitations of forecasting for shifting electricity consumption. In this way, families were able to act in a more sustainable way -- without necessarily reducing the amount of electricity consumed.

Finding ways to help people quit smoking is a high priority in health behavior change research. Recent HCI studies involving technologies using specific quitting techniques such as social support and SMS messaging to help people quit have reported some success. Early studies using computer generated print material report significant success of tailored versus non-tailored material, however, there is limited understanding on what aspects of digitally delivered quitting assistance should be tailored and how. To address this, we have conducted an empirical investigation with smokers to identify perceived importance of different types of help when quitting and the potential role of technology in providing such help. We found that people are highly individual in their approach to quitting and the kind of help they regard as relevant to their situation. Our contribution is a collection of empirically derived themes for tailoring smoking cessation apps to individual quitting needs.

Recent research has explored the role technology might play in future kitchens, including virtually dining together, recipe sharing, augmented kitchen furniture, reactive cooking utensils and gestural interaction. When people come together in a kitchen to cook it is about more than just production of sustenance -- it is about being together, helping each other, exchanging stories, and contributing to the gradual emergence of a shared meal. In this paper we present a digital ethnography of how people coordinate and cooperate in their kitchens when cooking together for the purpose of inspiring the design of social natural user interactions for technologies in the kitchen. The study is based on 61 YouTube videos of people cooking together analyzed using the frameworks of proxemics and F-formations. Our findings unfold and illustrate relationships between people's spatial organization, their cooking activities and physical kitchen layouts. Based on these we discuss the kitchen as a design space and particularly the opportunities for social natural user interaction design.

We present the design and evaluation of a smartphone app, QuittyLink, designed to help smokers reduce or stop smoking. Smoking cigarettes is a serious health risk and people who wish to quit often struggle to do so. It is well known that the most effective method of assisting smoking cessation is personal face-to-face counseling. However, this approach is only used by very few people wishing to quit for reasons such as inconvenience and personal shyness. In response to this we have created an app that provides personal counseling to users on their smartphone. The counseling content is authored by smoking cessation experts and is based on the user's personal data and recent actual smoking behaviors collected through the smartphone. We deployed the QuittyLink app with people in their everyday lives to study how personal counseling on mobile phones would influence their smoking behaviors. We found that both the personal counseling and the ability to visualize and reflect on their own self-tracked smoking behaviors helped them form strategies to improve their ability to quit.

Regular interactions with nature are vital for the development and wellbeing of children and also to build attachment and value for natural environments that potentially promote proenvironmental behaviour in later life. In this paper, we report on a study designed to identify opportunities for digital technology to support children's connectedness to the natural environment, thereby encouraging positive environmental attitudes in children, as well as healthy physical play. Through participatory engagement with a group of 15 Danish children (aged 812) and their parents, using focus groups and follow up interviews, we explore what motivates children to undertake everyday recreational activities, focusing on activities undertaken in nature, and how these interactions influence meaning associated with their local natural place. The contribution of this paper is a deeper understanding of what motivates children to interact with nature, and a discussion of how technology may enhance this interaction.

Traditional video communication systems offer a very limited experience of eye contact due to the offset between cameras and the screen. In response, we present EyeGaze, which uses multiple Kinect cameras to generate a 3D model of the user, and then renders a virtual camera angle giving the user an experience of eye contact. As a novel approach, we use concepts from KinectFusion, such as a volumetric voxel data representation and GPU accelerated ray tracing for viewpoint rendering. This achieves detail from a noisy source, and allows the real-time video output to be a composite of old and new data. We frame our work in literature on eye contact and previous approaches to supporting it over video. We then describe EyeGaze, and an empirical study comparing it with communication face-to-face or over traditional video. The study shows that while face-to-face is still superior, EyeGaze has added value over traditional video in terms of eye contact, involvement, turn-taking and co-presence.

Within HCI, aging is often viewed in terms of designing assistive technologies to improve the lives of older people, such as those who are suffering from frailty or memory loss. Our research adopts a very different approach, reframing the relationship in terms of wisdom, creativity and invention. We ran a series of workshops where groups of retirees, aged between early 60s and late 80s, used the MaKey MaKey inventor's toolkit. We asked them to think about inventing the future and suggest ideas for new technologies. Our findings showed that they not only rose to the challenge but also mastered the technology, collaborated intensely together while using it and freely and at length discussed their own, their family's and others' relationship with technology. We discuss the value of empowering people in this way and consider what else could be invented to enable more people to be involved in the design and use of creative technologies.

Recent focus on sustainability has made consumers more aware of our joint responsibility for conserving energy resources such as electricity. However, reducing electricity use can be difficult with only a meter and a monthly or annual electricity bill. With the emergence of new power meters units, information on electricity consumption is now available digitally and wirelessly. This enables the design and deployment of a new class of persuasive systems giving consumers insight into their use of energy resources and means for reducing it. In this paper, we explore the design and use of one such system, Power Advisor, promoting electricity conservation through tailored information on a mobile phone or tablet. The use of the system in 10 households was studied over 7 weeks. Findings provide insight into peoples awareness of electricity consumption in their home and how this may be influenced through design.

This paper revisits a research methods survey from 2003 and contrasts it with a survey from 2010. The motivation is to gain insight about how mobile HCI research has evolved over the last decade in terms of approaches and focus. The paper classifies 144 publications from 2009 published in 10 prominent outlets by their research methods and purpose. Comparing this to the survey for 2000-02 show that mobile HCI research has changed methodologically. From being almost exclusively driven by engineering and applied research, current mobile HCI is primarily empirically driven, involves a high number of field studies, and focus on evaluating and understanding, as well as engineering. It has also become increasingly multi-methodological, combining and diversifying methods from different disciplines. At the same time, new opportunities and challenges have emerged.

In recent years there has been an introduction of sophisticated new video conferencing technologies (e.g., HP Halo, Cisco Telepresence) that have led to enhancements in the collaborative user experience over traditional video conferencing technologies. Traditional video conferencing set-ups often distort the shared spatial properties of action and communication due to screen and camera orientation disparities and other asymmetries. These distortions affect access to the common resources used to mutually organize action and communication. By contrast, new systems, such as Halo, are physically configured to reduce these asymmetries and orientation disparities, thereby minimizing these spatial distortions. By creating appropriate shared spatial geometries, the distributed spaces become “blended” where the spatial geometries of the local space continue coherently across the distributed boundary into the remote site, providing the illusion of a single unified space. Drawing on theories of embodied action and workplace design we discuss the importance of this geometric “blending” of space for distributed collaboration and how this is achieved in systems such as Halo. We then extend these arguments to explore the concept of Blended Interaction Spaces : blended spaces in which interactive groupware is incorporated in ways spatially consistent with the physical geometries of the video-mediated set-up. We illustrate this discussion through a system called BISi that introduces interactive horizontal and vertical multipoint surfaces into a blended video-mediated collaboration space. In presenting this system, we highlight some of the particular challenges of creating these systems arising from the spatial consequences of different interaction mechanisms (e.g., direct touch or remote control) and how they affect movement and spatial configuration of people in these spaces.

A lot of research has been done within the area of mobile computing and context-awareness over the last 15 years, and the idea of systems adapting to their context has produced promising results for overcoming some of the challenges of user interaction with mobile devices within various specialized domains. However, today it is still the case that only a limited body of theoretically grounded knowledge exists that can explain the relationship between users, mobile system user interfaces, and their context. Lack of such knowledge limits our ability to elevate learning from the mobile systems we develop and study from a concrete to an abstract level. Consequently, the research field is impeded in its ability to leap forward and is limited to incremental steps from one design to the next. Addressing the problem of this void, this article contributes to the body of knowledge about mobile interaction design by promoting a theoretical approach for describing and understanding the relationship between user interface representations and user context. Specifically, we promote the concept of indexicality derived from semiotics as an analytical concept that can be used to describe and understand a design. We illustrate the value of the indexicality concept through an analysis of empirical data from evaluations of three prototype systems in use. Based on our analytical and empirical work we promote the view that users interpret information in a mobile computer user interface through creation of meaningful indexical signs based on the ensemble of context and system.

As urban environments become increasingly hybridized, mixing the social, built, and digital in interesting ways, designing for computing in the city presents new challenges—how do we understand such hybridization, and then respond to it as designers? Here we synthesize earlier work in human-computer interaction, sociology and architecture in order to deliberately influence the design of digital systems with an understanding of their built and social context of use. We propose, illustrate, and evaluate a multidisciplinary approach combining rapid ethnography, architectural analysis, design sketching, and paper prototyping. Following the approach we are able to provide empirically grounded representations of the socio-physical context of use, in this case people socializing in urban spaces. We then use this understanding to influence the design of a context aware system to be used while out on the town. We believe that the approach is of value more generally, particularly when achieving powerfully situated interactions is the design ambition.

Mobile computer technologies are increasingly being appropriated and used to facilitate people's social life outside the work domain. Addressing this emerging domain of use, we present the design of a context-aware mobile information system prototype facilitating sociality in public places: Just-for-Us. The design of the prototype system was informed by two empirical studies: an architectural analysis of a recently built public space in Melbourne, Australia and a field study of small groups socialising there. We describe these two studies and illustrate how findings informed our prototype design. Finally, we outline an ongoing field study of the use of the Just-for-Us prototype.

The research presented in this paper aims to inform interface design for mobile guides by understanding and modelling the built environments in which the guide will be used. This is important because research into the use of mobile guides has shown that people have a strong ability to make sense of the physical space in which they are situated and make use of this when using mobile guides. Based on a field study and architectural analysis of the recently built Federation Square in Melbourne, Australia, we present a descriptive framework, MIRANDA, which provides a summarized abstraction of the fundamental architectural and informational features of a built environment. The use of this descriptive framework in HCI design for mobile guides is exemplified through the design of a mobile guide system for Federation Square that was informed by the identified architectural characteristics. On the basis of the field study and example design, we argue that mobile guides interface design can benefit from making use of 'knowledge-in-the-world' by streamlining and indexing information and functionality to physical information cues implicit in the built environment surrounding the user.