Voice user interfaces (VUIs) are increasingly mainstream but remain challenging to use for people with speech and communication disabilities, accented or disfluent speech, and other forms of speech variability. While previous work has explored technical approaches to improve VUI accessibility, less is known about how prepared designers feel to design accessible voice interactions in practice. We conducted an exploratory online survey (n = 22) and focus group (n = 7) to discuss designers’ accessibility practices, confidence, and perceived support needs for accessible VUI design. Survey results indicate participants were familiar with general accessibility principles and guidelines (mainly GUI-focused), yet felt little confidence and limited support for VUIs specifically. Focus group discussions highlighted organisational constraints, limited voice-specific guidance and evaluation methods, and the need to include people with lived experience and domain experts (e.g., speech therapists) in design discussions. We flag opportunities for further HCI research on tools and processes for accessible VUI design in practice.

Urban air pollution is a major public health and sustainability concern, yet there is a limited understanding of how air-quality monitoring is incorporated into users’ everyday routines. Drawing on social practice theory, we examine monitoring as a configuration of materials, competences, and meanings, and report results from an exploratory survey of end users ( = 91). We identify two monitoring configurations: situational monitors, who report infrequent monitoring and lower indicator familiarity, and tech-engaged monitors, who report more regular monitoring and greater engagement with monitoring tools. Building on these patterns, we extrapolate design implications for wearable air-quality monitors (WAQMs), including support for different monitoring rhythms, design for interpretation and situated action, and bodily and domestic integration. We position this work as exploratory and call for qualitative and longitudinal research on monitoring-as-practice.

Narrative games increasingly rely on player agency to support immersive, expressive play.Yet little empirical work explores how difficulty design interacts with agency.In this pilot study, five participants completed 75 gameplay attempts across two boss encounters in Elden Ring, using embedded support mechanics introduced through gameplay and narrative framing.We hypothesised that providing affordances for agency under pressure would help sustain immersion.Instead, we observed convergence toward dominant strategies-what we describe as a forced-choice effect-with variation in how players interpreted them.While some preserved an interpretive sense of acting in character, others shifted attention toward the mechanics themselves, pulling players out of the character's perspective and weakening perceived agency.These findings raise questions about how agency is shaped not just by design, but by interpretation.We flag this not as conclusions, but as timely concerns in an under-explored space of narrative game design.

International audience

Modular Tangible User Interfaces (TUIs) –i.e., UIs made of small-scale physical modules– offer novel opportunities for tangible interaction thanks to their highly customizable form factor. Such modular TUIs were proposed with different shape of modules and bonding strength between them. The problem we address in this paper is the lack of knowledge of how bonding strength and shape of the modules impact usability. We present the first study exploring the impact of bonding strength and module shape on subjective user ratings when interacting with a magnetic modular prototype. We assessed three levels of bonding strength (low, mid, high) and two shapes (cubes and rounded cubes) in a controlled user study. Participants performed eight common manipulations found in the literature for (non-)modular TUIs. Experimental results showed that (1) cubic modules are overall easier and more satisfying to manipulate, except for precision and bending tasks, (2) low strength impairs UI solidity, but high strength impairs precision tasks with cubic modules.

Shape-changing User Interfaces (UIs) explore the ability of a UI to change its physical shape to support multiple interaction modalities for users’ input and/or system’s output. An approach currently studied to implement such interfaces at a high resolution is based on mm-sized, round, and self-actuated modules. The problem we tackle in this paper is to find the range of usable sizes of such modules, to better inform the trade-off between usability and technological feasibility. We assessed four sliders in a controlled user study: a standard slider and three sliders made of mock-up rounded modules of 1 mm, 2.5 mm, and 5 mm. Experimental results show that (1) 5 mm modules significantly impair performance for the pursuit task and subjective perception for both tasks, (2) performance increases when the size of modules decreases, but (3) users reportedly enjoyed the haptic feedback provided by 1 mm to 2.5 mm modules. These results provide deeper understanding on the impact of the size of modules on performance and subjective perception to inform current technological development of physical user interfaces made of small robotic modules.

Shape-changing User Interfaces attract growing interest in Human-Computer Interaction. Modular robotics offer a great opportunity for their implementation. However, the current theoretical and technical advances of modular robotics are fragmented and little centered on the user. To unify existing work and center future research on the user, we perform a systematic literature review enabling us to build a unifying space for the design of modular shape-changing user interfaces.Our aim is to bridge the gap between HCI and robotics. We relate properties of different domains and identify inconsistencies to structure the design space. Towards this aim, we conduct a thorough cross-disciplinary survey to propose: 1) a set of design properties at the scale of the interface (macro-scale) and at the scale of the modules (micro-scale) and 2) the impact of these properties on each other. This paper can be used to describe and compare existing modular shape-changing UIs and generate new design ideas by building upon knowledge from robotics and HCI.