Delivery robots are an emerging technology that promise benefits (reducing reliance on human-driven delivery vehicles and minimizing the impact of local traffic conditions). One limitation of such robots is their restricted range. A potential solution is to integrate these robots into existing public transport (PT) systems. One underexplored direction is extending their mobility through PT like buses. This scenario introduces distinct human–robot interaction (HRI) challenges: close physical proximity, shifting attention, implicit social norms, and multiple stakeholders occupying the same confined space.

We present and evaluate the concept of winds – micro challenges to be done in the physical world post-smartphone overload, to encourage exiting the digital smartphone tunnel and promote refreshing breaks from the digital realm. Whereas digital detox solutions are unsustainable in everyday life, current everyday interventions such as screen time reminders or app blockers can induce negative feelings in users. We hypothesize that winds, delivered by our mobile app Real-World Wind (RWW), promote balance between the user’s physical and digital activities, as well as engagement with the intervention. RWW tracks users’ smartphone use behavior and distributes winds of five categories upon overload pattern detection. We evaluated the effectiveness of RWW in a week-long field study with 25 participants. Our findings show that winds foster a fun and engaging experience, and significantly promote balance between the digital and physical world post-smartphone overload. We discuss implications for future technology overload interventions.

Career choice is a life-changing decision for young adults. Online career guidance systems facilitate information access and provide recommendations for career paths. However, they bear the risk of imposed decisions, as they often neglect the non-cognitive processes of career decision-making. Mobile apps are promising for supporting career choices, since smartphones are a constant companion of adolescents. Following a user-centered design process, we developed “FindMyself”, a mobile app helping users discover their personal strengths and interests. FindMyself includes multiple sessions, prompting users with short challenges and reflection tasks building a personal profile. Our approach leaves time for self-reflection and discussion with peers. In a field study (N = 46), we found that FindMyself was perceived as easy, flexible, and fun to use, and was able to support self-reflection. For future iterations, some users requested specific career recommendations. We discuss these results and derive implications for further research on career decision support tools.

For most people, smartphones have become daily companions, offering ubiquitous information access and social communication. The majority of smartphone users sometimes feel distracted by their mobile devices and have experienced regretful smartphone use. The downsides of smartphone use have been widely explored by the literature. What is missing, however, is a suggestion of alternative activities users would like to perform instead of using their smartphone. We therefore conducted an online survey with N = 67 participants exploring users preferred activities alternative to regretful smartphone use for different time-frames. Our results show that usage sessions shorter than ten minutes are less prone to inducing a feeling of regret. Users’ concrete suggestions range from relaxation and self-care activities (10 to 20 minutes) to social and outdoor activities (more than 20 minutes) with a trend towards leisure activities rather than work-related ones. We finally provide impulses how to promote these activities through technology.

Common sources of career information like websites often provide a static overall picture of a job, yet lack personal insights into the daily working life. To address this problem, we present a novel mobile career guidance method: It enables users to remotely gain an impression of different work routines by receiving several short, scheduled chat messages from a persona throughout the day. These messages were previously collected from real professionals reporting on their tasks over a week. We implemented a smartphone application to compare our message-based approach to a traditional blog entry in a two-week within-subject field study (N = 17). Users highlighted that the scheduled messages (1) enhanced their understanding of work routines by integrating career information into their own daily context and (2) offered authentic insights into the jobs. We discuss design implications for mobile career guidance systems and future opportunities for presenting chunks of information in a temporal context.

When wearing a head-mounted display (HMD) in everyday environments, interactions with real world bystanders often fail due to the visual barrier. As a result, the HMD user takes off the headset, which ends the virtual reality (VR) experience. We address this problem by providing a shared surface with the same content for both users, which is located at the same physical position in the real and the virtual world. In a between-subject user study (N = 40), we investigate the effects of a shared surface for short-term collaboration in co-located mixed-presence scenarios. We compare (a) real-world collaboration, (b) having a shared surface only and (c) combining the shared surface with an avatar representation of the real world user in VR. We could show that shared surfaces are helpful for mixed-presence collaboration. Adding an avatar in VR improves performance measures such as task-completion time, error rate and number of clarifying questions. To support future work in this field, we finally propose design implications and research directions.