Integrating Large Language Models (LLMs) into Interactive Digital Narratives (IDNs) enables dynamic storytelling where user interactions shape the narrative in real time, challenging traditional authoring methods.This paper presents the design study of Orchid, a creative approach for authoring LLM-driven IDNs.Orchid allows users to structure the hierarchy of narrative stages and define the rules governing LLM narrative generation and transitions between stages.The development of Orchid consists of three phases.1) Formulating Orchid through desk research on existing IDN practices.2) Implementation of a technology probe based on Orchid.3) Evaluating how IDN authors use Orchid to design IDNs, verify Orchid's hypotheses, and explore user needs for future authoring tools.This study confirms that authors are open to LLM-driven IDNs but desire strong authorial agency in narrative structures, highlighted in accuracy in branching transitions and story details.Future design implications for Orchid include introducing deterministic variable handling, support for trans-media applications, and narrative consistency across branches.

This work focuses on an active topic in the HCI community, namely tutorial creation by demonstration. We present a novel tool named SmartRecorder that facilitates people, without video editing skills, creating video tutorials for smartphone interaction tasks. As automatic interaction trace extraction is a key component to tutorial generation, we seek to tackle the challenges of automatically extracting user interaction traces on smartphones from screencasts. Uniquely, with respect to prior research in this field, we combine computer vision techniques with IMU-based sensing algorithms, and the technical evaluation results show the importance of smartphone IMU data in improving system performance. With the extracted key information of each step, SmartRecorder generates instructional content initially and provides tutorial creators with a tutorial refinement editor designed based on a high recall (99.38%) of key steps to revise the initial instructional content. Finally, SmartRecorder generates video tutorials based on refined instructional content. The results of the user study demonstrate that SmartRecorder allows non-experts to create smartphone usage video tutorials with less time and higher satisfaction from recipients.

Emotion is important for the conversational user interface. In prior research, conversational agents (CAs) employ natural language process techniques to create affective interaction based on text. However, the use of acoustic features of speech for voice-based CAs is under exploration. This work presents an acoustically emotion-aware CA that enables speech emotion recognition and stylizes responses with empathetic feedback and interjections. We conducted an experiment with 75 participants to evaluate their perceived emotional intelligence (PEI) after interacting with the CA. Our results show that the acoustical emotion-awareness increased the participants’ PEI of the CA, and the empathetic responses from the CA helped alleviate some participants’ negative emotions. Our work provides implications for designing future CAs with better PEI.

Some people with upper body motor impairments but sound lower limbs usually use feet to interact with smartphones. However, touching the touchscreen with big toes is tiring, inefficient and easy to mistouch. Targeting at this pain point, we propose FootUI, which leverages the phone camera to track users’ feet and translates the foot gestures to smartphone operations. This technique enables users to interact with smartphones while reclining on the bed and improves the comfort of users. In this paper, we present the design and evaluation of the foot gestures through user studies as well as the development and evaluation of FootUI. Results show that toes-based foot gestures are not only less perceivable but also uncomfortable. FootUI avoid the use of toes-based gestures and is proved to be an easy, efficient and interesting input technique for people with upper body motor impairments but sound lower limbs.