Meaningfulness is a profound aspect of our lives. So far, a concrete reflection of what meaning means in HCI is still rare. To understand users as humans, and thus, the humanity in being a user, we adopt Viktor Frankl’s understanding of users as meaning-seeking subjects. To make the concept of meaningfulness more graspable, we refer to what Frankl calls the three existentials of life: freedom, responsibility, and noos. We elaborate four dimensions, namely the existentials as an outcome, as their embeddedness in technology, their role in interaction, and their (non-)usage. This is followed by a discussion on the interwovenness of the three existentials as well as their potential impact on HCI research. By that, we aim to contribute to a profound understanding of meaning for HCI, from the epistemological to the methodological perspective, to enable meaning-centered design.

In Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) research, awareness for the relevance of diversity of users is increasing. In this work, we analyze whether the articulated need for more diversity-sensitive research led indeed to a higher consideration of diversity in HCI research. Based on a comprehensive collection of diversity dimensions, we present results of a quantitative content analysis of articles accepted in the Proceedings of the Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems 2006, 2011, and 2016. Results demonstrate how many and how intensively diversity dimensions were considered, and moreover highlight those dimensions that have so far received less attention. Uncovering continuous and discontinuous trends across time and differences between subfields of research, we identify research gaps and aim at contributing to a comprehensive understanding of diversity supporting diversity-sensitive research in HCI.

In this work, we identify influencing factors on modality choices of older adults. In detail, we investigated when and why older adults prefer speech over touch interaction and vice versa when interacting with a mobile multimodal health and wellbeing service. We conducted a study with 19 older adults using a mobile application with a duration of three to six weeks. Due to this long duration of the study we were able to gain highly external valid insights as our results are based on real world experiences. We identify additional influencing factors within the areas of user characteristics, contextual factors and perceived system characteristics. We outline the impact of the factors and highlight the importance of several of these factors to enable accessible user interfaces. Our results provide first steps towards a more holistic model of modality choices taking into account interdependencies of different factors.