Context Generative AI tools can enhance the productivity and effectiveness of software development. These tools are evolving rapidly, as are the associated risks. Therefore, software organizations adopting these tools need to understand their risks, why they occur, and how they evolve over time. Objective Previous research has highlighted risks related to using generative AI in software development; however, the underlying causes of these risks remain largely unexplored. To effectively manage these risks, we need to understand what causes them. Therefore, we examine the causal explanations behind the risks of using generative AI in software development organizations. Methods In a multi-case study of three Danish software organizations during the early stages of generative AI tool adoption, we interviewed software developers and managers within these organizations to uncover the causal explanations of risks associated with generative AI. We employed a causal mapping approach to understand and visualize the differences and similarities across software organizations’ causal explanations of risks. A year later, we returned to validate the risks and causal maps with representatives from each software organization. Results Our study shows that the software organizations exhibit circular reasoning regarding a perpetual uncertainty in the validity of AI-generated code, with the three risks: Mistrust of AI, Insufficient validation of AI output , and Insufficient/insecure AI output. They are also concerned about similar root risks, which solely cause other risks without being caused by any risks themselves, such as Lacking AI competencies . While they differed in emphasis on tail-end risks, which are understood as not causing any additional risks. Conclusion The causal mapping approach proved appropriate for showing similarities and differences in software organizations’ perceptions of risks and causal explanations related to the use of generative AI in software development. The same applies to visualizing how the emphasis on risks can change over time.

Software development relies on collaboration and alignment between a variety of roles, including software developers and user experience designers. The increasing focus on artificial intelligence in today's development projects has given rise to new challenges in this collaboration. We extend previous work on the process of designing human-AI systems by analysing collaborative practices between UX designers and AI developers through Mintzberg's theory on coordination mechanisms. We conducted 15 in-depth interviews with UX designers and AI developers currently working on AI projects. We contribute by identifying how coordination mechanisms impact the UX design process when developing AI systems , inter-team (a)symmetries in power relations, and a growing need for tools and cross-disciplinary knowledge to support these collaborative efforts. In particular, we outline the risks of coordinating AI development work through the standardisation of output and skills in separately organised UX and AI development teams. CCS Concepts • Software and its engineering → Collaboration in software development; • Human-centered computing → Collaborative and social computing.

Tangible input has been explored as a means for participants to self-report experiences while minimising disruption and allowing for discrete data collection. However, the accuracy of these tangible devices has not been studied systematically. We compared six input techniques, including slider, slider with resistance, capacitive touch slider, squeeze, rotary knob, and joystick, to understand their accuracy and resolution profile. Each of these wireless devices was designed in a similar form factor and intended to be operated discretely with one hand. We assessed input accuracy and participant perceptions across devices through a controlled lab study (N = 20), highlighting diverging limits to the accuracy of the input technique and possible explanations for the differences in resolution. Our results indicate that participant accuracy was highest using a slider, and lowest using a squeeze-based input. We discuss the suitability and challenges of discreet tangible self-report techniques, and highlight open research questions for future work.

Several smartwatch vendors have over the past years entered the market with a large range of devices that differ in the design qualities they offer. In this paper, we focus on design qualities that are either perceived, descriptive or physical, and we investigate which of them may lead people to prefer particular smartwatches over others. To do so we conducted a laboratory study with 93 potential smartwatch users and a trained panel study with 8 participants. Results were analysed through a multivariate statistical technique called Preference Mapping. The advantage of this technique is that it can relate a large number of design qualities to users’ preferences. Our findings show that participants can be divided into four groups with homogenous preferences, each emphasising a unique combination of design qualities. For example, some groups emphasised device shape, while others prioritised expensiveness for their preferred smartwatch. We conclude with implications of our work on practice and research.

Agility is an overarching ideal for empirically-driven software development processes that embrace change in order to improve quality, economy, and simplicity. While the pursuit of Agility has held prominence in software practice and research for over two decades, user experience (UX) designers struggle to integrate their work processes with agile software development. As empirical processes are constantly evolving, so is this integration struggle for UX designers. We, therefore, present an industrial case study of how a Danish software company integrates UX design and agile software development. We conducted a case study involving (a) one iteration of individual interviews with 10 employees (four UX designers, three software developers, two project managers, and one solution architect) and (b) a follow-up iteration consisting of a workshop with 6 employees (three UX designers, two solution architects, and one project manager) two years later. We analyzed how the company's approach to integration with 'upfront design' and 'work in parallel' involve mutual adjustments as opposed to assimilation or separation of UX design and software development. Our analysis shows how integration through mutual adjustments made distinct contributions to UX designers' and software developers' pursuit of Agility. They experienced notably different work processes that still dealt effectively with change and contributed to quality, economy, or simplicity. Nevertheless, as shown from a follow-up workshop two years after our first interviews, these processes were still susceptible to integration struggles over time. We conclude that integration based on mutual adjustment potentially makes Agility for UX designers and software developers different and mutually complementary. This integration contrasts with assimilation, which potentially makes their Agility mutually indistinguishably, and with separation, which makes their Agility different and mutually competing.

Out of hospital cardiac arrest is a life-threatening event that requires immediate resuscitation actions. Therefore, digital volunteer responder initiatives integrate nearby users who can be activated anytime, anywhere through mobile technologies to assist in administering first aid. While research has found that such initiatives increases the chances of surviving, we know little about how responders use the digital services, and how they organize themselves before, during, and after responding. We conducted interviews with volunteer responders (N=16) to address how they perceive these initiatives and in particular how they negotiate availability temporally (anytime) and spatially (anywhere) for such life-threatening events. Our findings show that our responders exhibited strong perceptions of how and why one should volunteer. Also, the temporal aspect of being available anytime integrates several dimensions, while being available anywhere is highly related to safety, community and group roles. Finally, we discuss implications for design of volunteer responder initiatives.

Cued Recall Debriefing (CRD) is a form of retrospective think aloud approach. It involves re-immersing users to a level where emotional responses are comparable to those experienced during actual interaction with a system. To validate whether the robustness of CRD would vary with the time gap between the actual and recalled event and with the affective state preceding the recall, two empirical studies with altogether 100 participants were conducted. Specifically, participants’ emotions were measured in terms of galvanic skin response (GSR) , heart rate (HR) , and self-assessment manikin (SAM) rating when they were interacting with an email client seeded with usability problems. The same measures were taken when they viewed the videoed interactions. Two between-subject variables were ‘intervening time’ (from 0 minutes up to 24 hours) and ‘intervening affect’ (images with different valence and arousal). Advanced computational models were applied to optimise the shifting of GSR/HR waves generated at the actual interaction and recall phases, which were found to be significantly correlated. The shifting process is necessary for addressing the memory effect and is a methodological innovation. Overall, CRD proved to be a robust method that can be deployed to a broad range of HCI research and practice contexts.

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.

Recently a number of studies appeared that operationalised coolness and explored its relation to digital products. Literature suggests that perceived coolness is another factor of user experience, and this adds to an existing explosion of dimensions related to aesthetics, hedonic quality, pragmatic quality, attractiveness, etc. A critical challenge highlighted in prior research is to study the relationships among those factors and so far, no studies have empirically examined the relationship between coolness and other established user experience factors. In this paper, we address this challenge by presenting two studies one that focuses on factors from two cool questionnaires, and one that compares them against existing User eXperience (UX) factors. Our findings show that factors from the two cool questionnaires converge and they also converge to existing, established UX factors. Thus, 11 distinct cool and UX factors converge into 5 for the case of mobile devices. Our findings are important for researchers, as we demonstrate through a validated model that coolness is part of UX research, as well as for practitioners, by developing a questionnaire that can reliably measure both perceived inner and outer coolness as well as the overall coolness judgement based on 5 factors and 21 items.

In the past decade, there has been increasing interest in studying tabletop technologies in HCI. Using the Gartners Hype Cycle as an analytical framework, this article presents developments in tabletop research within the last decade. The objective is to determine the level of maturity of tabletop technologies with respect to the research foci and the extent to which tabletops have shown their worth in real world settings. We identify less studied topics in the current body of literature with the primary aim of evoking further discussions of the current and future research challenges. We analyzed 542 research publications and categorized these according to eight types of research foci. Findings show that only 3% of all studies are conducted in natural settings, i.e. there is a clear tendency to emphasize laboratory evaluations of tabletop technology. Also, very few studies demonstrate relative benefits of tabletops over other technologies in collaborative settings (1%). We argue for a need to increase emphasis on understanding real-world use and impact rather than developing new tabletop technologies.

Frustration is used as a criterion for identifying usability problems (UPs) and for rating their severity in a few of the existing severity scales, but it is not operationalized. No research has systematically examined how frustration varies with the severity of UPs. We aimed to address these issues with a hybrid approach, using Self-Assessment Manikin, comments elicited with Cued-Recall Debrief, galvanic skin responses (GSR) and gaze data. Two empirical studies involving a search task with a website known to have UPs were conducted to substantiate findings and improve on the methodological framework, which could facilitate usability evaluation practice. Results showed no correlation between GSR peaks and severity ratings, but GSR peaks were correlated with frustration scores -- a metric we developed. The Peak-End rule was partially verified. The problematic evaluator effect was the limitation as it confounded the severity ratings of UPs. Future work is aimed to control this effect and to develop a multifaceted severity scale.

Coolness has recently started to be explored as a design goal for interactive products from practitioners as well as researchers within human–computer interaction (HCI), but there is still a need to further operationalise the concept and explore how we can measure it. Our contribution in this paper is the COOL questionnaire. We based the creation of the questionnaire on literature suggesting that perceived coolness is decomposed to outer cool (the style of a product) and inner cool (the personality characteristics assigned to it). In this paper, we focused on inner cool, and we identified 11 inner cool characteristics. These were used to create an initial pool of question items and 2236 participants were asked to assess 16 mobile devices. By performing exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses, we identified three factors that can measure the perceived inner coolness of interactive products: desirability, rebelliousness and usability. These factors and their underlying 16 question items comprise the COOL questionnaire. The whole process of creating the questionnaire is presented in detail in this paper and we conclude by discussing our work against related work on coolness and HCI.

Usability evaluations provide software development teams with insights on the degree to which a software application enables a user to achieve his/her goals, how fast these goals can be achieved, how easy it is to learn and how satisfactory it is in use. Although usability evaluations are crucial in the process of developing software systems with a high level of usability, their use is still limited in the context of small software development companies. Several approaches have been proposed to support software development practitioners (SWPs) in conducting usability evaluations and this paper presents two in-depth empirical studies of supporting SWPs by training them to become barefoot usability evaluators. Findings show that the SWPs after 30 hours of training obtained considerable abilities in identifying usability problems and that this approach revealed a high level of downstream utility. Results also show that the SWPs created relaxed conditions for the test users when acting as test monitors but experienced problems with making users think aloud. Considering the quality of problem descriptions, we found that the SWPs were better at providing clear and precise problem descriptions than at describing the impact, cause, user actions and providing data support for observations.

Remote asynchronous usability testing involves users directly in reporting usability problems. Most studies of this approach employ predefined tasks to ensure that users experience specific aspects of the system, whereas other studies use no task assignments. Yet the effect of using predefined tasks is still to be uncovered. There is also limited research on instructions for users in identifying usability problems. This paper reports from a comparative study of the effect of task assignments and instruction types on the problems identified in remote asynchronous usability testing of a website for information retrieval, involving 53 prospective users. The results show that users solving predefined tasks identified significantly more usability problems with a significantly higher level of agreement than those working on their own authentic tasks. Moreover, users that were instructed by means of examples of usability problems identified significantly more usability problems than those who received a conceptual definition of usability problems.

Remote asynchronous usability testing is characterized by both a spatial and temporal separation of users and evaluators. This has the potential both to reduce practical problems with securing user attendance and to allow direct involvement of users in usability testing. In this paper, we report from an empirical study where we systematically compared three methods for remote asynchronous usability testing: user-reported critical incidents, forum-based online reporting and discussion, and diary-based longitudinal user reporting. In addition, conventional laboratory-based think-aloud testing was included as a benchmark for the remote methods. The results show that each remote asynchronous method supports identification of a considerable number of usability problems. Although this is only about half of the problems identified with the conventional method, it requires significantly less time. This makes remote asynchronous methods an appealing possibility for usability testing in many software projects.