Virtual environments for therapy are scarce and lack personalization. The creation of these environments is done by specialists, is time-consuming, and expensive. We present a smartphone tool that allows non-specialists to create navigable virtual environments by taking and linking sequences of panoramic photo spheres, analogly to Google Street View. Editing the environments is then possible in a web platform, myView, where text, images, videos, sounds, and pick-up objects can be added. myView allows users to navigate their environments as well as sharing those environments with others. In a preliminary study with two psychologists, where myView was used as an elicitation probe, the approach was found to be useful for creating meaningful activities for reminiscence and cognitive training. The platform showed to be promising in the democratization of the crafting of virtual environments.

Unauthorized physical access to personal devices by people known to the owner of the device is a common concern, and a common occurrence. But how do people experience incidents of unauthorized access? Using an online survey, we collected 102 accounts of unauthorized access. Participants wrote stories about past situations in which either they accessed the smartphone of someone they know, or someone they know accessed theirs. We describe the context leading up to these incidents, the course of events, and the consequences. We then identify two orthogonal themes in how participants conceptualized these incidents. First, participants understood trust as performative vulnerability: trust was necessary to sustain relationships, but building trust required displaying vulnerability to breaches. Second, participants were self-serving in their sensemaking: they blamed the circumstances, or the other person's shortcomings, but rarely themselves. We discuss the implications of our findings for security design and practice.

Facebook accounts are secured against unauthorized access through passwords and device-level security. Those defenses, however, may not be sufficient to prevent social insider attacks, where attackers know their victims, and gain access to a victim's account by interacting directly with their device. To characterize these attacks, we ran two MTurk studies. In the first (n = 1,308), using the list experiment method, we estimated that 24% of participants had perpetrated social insider attacks and that 21% had been victims (and knew about it). In the second study (n = 45), participants wrote stories detailing personal experiences with such attacks. Using thematic analysis, we typified attacks around five motivations (fun, curiosity, jealousy, animosity, and utility), and explored dimensions associated with each type. Our combined findings indicate that social insider attacks are common, often have serious emotional consequences, and have no simple mitigation.

Touch-enabled devices have a growing variety of screen sizes; however, there is little knowledge on the effect of key size on non-visual text-entry performance. We conducted a user study with 12 blind participants to investigate how non-visual input performance varies with four QWERTY keyboard sizes (ranging from 15mm to 2.5mm). This paper presents an analysis of typing performance and touch behaviors discussing its implications for future research. Our findings show that there is an upper limit to the benefits of larger target sizes between 10mm and 15mm. Input speed decreases from 4.5 to 2.4 words per minute (WPM) for targets sizes below 10mm. The smallest size was deemed unusable by participants even though performance was in par with previous work.

In Computer Science Education there is a tendency to implement active learning paradigms where students are the focus of the educational process. An instantiation of these learning methods are gaming environments. We present ProGames, a system for learning programming skills through a leveled set of visually-attractive and interactive programming games in Greenfoot, categorized by student's likes, offering them solutions to sets of problems that they really enjoy or like most. We present a combined evaluation of usability (first) done during the academic course 2012-13 in three Computer Science Degrees and an evaluation of appealing for the students (second) based on the organization in games categories done during the academic course 2013-14. The combination of both evaluations suggests that offering students a set of serious games that meets their likes really increases their appeal for the games and therefore for learning with them. We present this experience to encourage academia to propose their students learning materials which really are appealing to them and why not? Fun.

When teaching in university courses, one of the main problems is the students' lack of motivation for everyday study. Learning management systems (LMS) provide a set of tools that students must handle to follow the course, but usually students need additional aid to effectively mastering these tools. We present here Merlin-Know, a new module for the Moodle LMS to help students do extra work and reviewing on-line. It is based on a virtual teacher who guides, motivates and encourages students. We also show two kinds of evaluation. First, the system was used for revising the activities of students along the semester. We conclude that Merlin-Know has a statistically positive influence on students' learning outcomes, obtaining a positive correlation for all difficulty levels. Second, we conducted a usability evaluation to assess the acceptance by students' and to detect ways of improvement. Average students said that Merlin-Know was useful and helped them to be more effective and productive, it was easy to learn and use and it has a friendly interface, and they easily remembered how to use it.

In Computer Science Education there is a tendency to implement active learning paradigms where students are the focus of the educational process. An instantiation of these learning methods are gaming environments. We present ProGames, a system for learning programming skills through a leveled set of visually-attractive and interactive programming games in Greenfoot, categorized by student's likes offering them solutions to sets of problems that they really enjoy or like most. The system has been evaluated during the academic course 2012-13 in three Computer Science Degrees and our results indicate that using ProGames had a most positive influence in the students learning. Moreover, the subjective opinion of students reflects that they really enjoyed working with the system and increased the engagement with the course.

Blind people typically resort to audio feedback to access information on electronic devices. However, this modality is not always an appropriate form of output. Novel approaches that allow for private and inconspicuous interaction are paramount. In this paper, we present a vibrotactile reading device that leverages the users' Braille knowledge to read textual information. UbiBraille consists of six vibrotactile actuators that are used to code a Braille cell and communicate single characters. The device is able to simultaneously actuate the users' index, middle, and ring fingers of both hands, providing fast and mnemonic output. We conducted two user studies on UbiBraille to assess both character and word reading performance. Character recognition rates ranged from 54% to 100% and were highly character- and user-dependent. Indeed, participants with greater expertise in Braille reading/writing were able to take advantage of this knowledge and achieve higher accuracy rates. Regarding word reading performance, we investigated four different vibrotactile timing conditions. Participants were able to read entire words and obtained recognition rates up to 93% with the most proficient ones being able achieve a rate of 1 character per second.

Social competency training, as part of psychotherapy, for children and teenagers, requires them to engage on outdoor activities in which they have to complete tasks such as talking to someone or visiting a specific place. Currently, the inability for therapists to monitor their patients, to promote collaborative efforts and to reinforce positive attitudes is a major issue that affects both the therapy process and its results.

This paper presents an application for collaborative design of mobile prototypes, covering both prototyping and evaluation stages of design. Virtual design workspaces provide designers with the necessary mechanisms to build and test prototypes. Shared versions of these workspaces along with annotation mechanisms offer the ability to not only constitute collaborative design groups, but also perform group evaluation of the created prototypes. Evaluation provided positive feedback on the approach taken for the collaborative design tool.

Mobile interaction design introduces added challenges when compared with the usual design process for fixed technologies. In particular, it benefits greatly from the ability to take the design process out of the lab, creating, designing and evaluating applications within their natural usage context. However, this process requires new and deeply refined approaches to traditional techniques which are demanding and still avoided by designers. This paper presents a tool that overcomes some of these issues by offering means to support in-situ design. The tool supports prototyping of mobile applications and user interfaces on real scenarios, also providing evaluation features that allow the logging and analysis of usage information. We describe the tool’s concept, goals and design implications, focusing, in particular, its out-on-the-field, in-situ design and prototyping features.

In this paper we present a software framework which supports the construction of mixed-fidelity (from sketch-based to software) prototypes for mobile devices. The framework is available for desktop computers and mobile devices (e.g., PDAs, Smartphones). It operates with low-fidelity sketch based prototypes or mid to high-fidelity prototypes with some range of functionality, providing several dimensions of customization (e.g., visual components, audio/video files, navigation, behavior) and targeting specific usability concerns. Furthermore, it allows designers and users to test the prototypes on actual devices, gathering usage information, both passively (e.g., logging) and actively (e.g., questionnaires/Experience Sampling). Overall, it conveys common prototyping procedures with effective data gathering methods that can be used on ubiquitous scenarios supporting in-situ prototyping and participatory design on-the-go. We address the framework's features and its contributions to the design and evaluation of applications for mobile devices and the field of mobile interaction design, presenting real-life case studies and results.

This paper presents a set of lessons that resulted from the design process of several mobile applications. It starts by addressing the difficulties that emerged through the data gathering, prototyping and evaluation stages also stressing the absence of adequate techniques and methods to support these activities. We explain how these problems and challenges were solved and how they can be applied in other domains and future projects. As a result, we provide a set of guidelines for designers to apply on the development and design of mobile applications and user interfaces. The paper also addresses three case studies in which these guidelines and procedures were validated, stressing their contributions and results.

Digital Talking Books (DTBs) offer to visually impaired users an evolution of analogue talking books that mimics the interaction possibilities of print books. This paper describes a new DTB player which tries to improve the usability and accessibility of current players, through the combination of the possibilities offered by multimodal interaction and interface adaptability, and the integration of several language processing components. Besides the potential for a greater enjoyment of the reader in general, these modifications also pave the way to the use of DTBs in different domains, from e-inclusion to e-learning applications. Index Terms: digital talking books, Portuguese. 1.

This article presents FAME, a model-based Framework for Adaptive Multimodal Environments. FAME proposes an architecture for adaptive multimodal applications, a new way to represent adaptation rules - the behavioral matrix - and a set of guidelines to assist the design process of adaptive multimodal applications. To demonstrate FAME's validity, the development process of an adaptive Digital Talking Book player is summarized.

We present DiTaBBu, Digital Talking Books Builder, a framework for automatic production of time-based hypermedia for the Web, focusing on the Digital Talking Books domain. Delivering Digital Talking Books collections to a wide range of users is an expensive task, as it must take into account each user profile's different needs, therefore authoring should be dismissed in favour of automation. With DiTaBBu, we enable automated content delivery in several playback platforms, targeted to specific user needs, featuring powerful navigation capabilities over the content. DiTaBBu can also be used as testbed for prototyping novel capabilities, through its flexible extension mechanisms.

GOMS is a well-known model that has been successfully used in predicting the performance of human-computer interaction, identifying usability problems and improving user-interface design. The focus of GOMS on the individual user, however, explains why it has not been applied in the groupware context. We were inspired by GOMS to define a model that describes collaborative tasks in a formal way. We illustrate the application of the model by applying it to the design of a collaborative tool for software engineering requirements negotiation.

In this paper we identify adaptation enabling variables, and components that can be adapted, in a setting specific to Digital Talking Books. We then propose an evolution to our Digital Talking Book builder framework, to enable the production of adaptive books.

Considerable effort has been devoted at# # # to increase and broaden our speech and text data resources. Digital Talking Books (DTB), comprising both speech and text data are, as such, an invaluable asset as multimedia resources. Furthermore, those DTB have been under a speech-to-text alignment procedure, either word or phone-based, to increase their potential in research activities. This paper thus describes the motivation and the method that we used to accomplish this goal for aligning DTBs. This alignment allows specific access interfaces for persons with special needs, and also tools for easily detecting and indexing units (words, sentences, topics) in the spoken books. The alignment tool was implemented in a Weighted Finite State Transducer framework, which provides an efficient way to combine different types of knowledge sources, such as alternative pronunciation rules. With this tool, a 2-hour long spoken book was aligned in a single step in much less than real time. Last but not least, new browsing interfaces, allowing improved access and data retrieval to and from the DTBs, are described in this paper.

This paper addresses the direct manipulation of concept maps. These maps are visually supported by graph-based diagrams. Constraints on nodes, visual attributes and arcs, reflect the syntax and semantic of the underlying conceptual model. Tools allowing the manipulation of concept maps convey these constraints by offering simple feedback hints to user actions. Particular application domains require the use of spatial regions (contexts) to convey equivalence on concept properties or types. In these cases, further restrictions are imposed. Therefore, richer feedback must be supported for effective direct manipulation.The paper proposes an approach to handle spatial contexts in concept maps. The approach provides means to define enhanced feedback on direct manipulation of concepts and relations within and over context boundaries. The technique is based on the separtion of the feedback representations for device and action. It controls their relative distance, mobility and visual attributes. Manipulation of contexts and simultaneous views over contexts are also discussed. Specific behaviors are proposed and a technique to offer coherent views on multiple contexts is presented. The architecture of the system that supports these features is described.