Educator Perceptions of XRAuthor: An Accessible Tool for Authoring Learning Content with Different Immersion Levels

Queer young men (similar to others in the LGBTQ+ community) depend heavily on social platforms but their use can often be problematic. Their needs are often not adequately considered in the design of general platforms and they can be exposed to intra-community harms on LGBTQ+ specific platforms such as dating apps. To explore how social platform design could be improved to better support the needs of queer young men, we conducted a co-design study. We recruited 13 queer men working in technology design to generate new concepts for social platform features. We then refined these concepts and evaluated them in group sessions with end users, a different cohort of 15 queer young men. Here we present mockups of the concepts and findings from evaluations. Our findings show specific ways that providing more agency to social platform users could improve their experiences and we discuss implications for design.

The rise of generative AI presents new opportunities for the understanding and practice of self-care through its capability to generate varied content, including self-care suggestions via text and images, and engage in dialogue with users over time. However, there are also concerns about accuracy and trustworthiness of self-care advice provided via AI. This paper reports our findings from workshops, diaries, and interviews with five researchers and 24 participants to explore their experiences and use of generative AI for self-care. We analyze our findings to present a framework for the use of generative AI to support five types of self-care, – advice seeking, mentorship, resource creation, social simulation, and therapeutic self-expression – mapped across two dimensions – expertise and modality. We discuss how these practices shift the role of technologies for self-care from merely offering information to offering personalized advice and supporting creativity for reflection, and we offer suggestions for using the framework to investigate new self-care designs.

This paper describes a mixed-methods usability study of seven diverse Self-Service Technologies (SSTs). SSTs mediate many of our everyday interactions with individuals, businesses, and government organizations. Parking meters, transport ticket machines, electric vehicle recharge points, and fast-food ordering kiosks are all likely familiar examples of this category of technology, promising convenient access to products and services. Despite their ubiquity, many SSTs suffer from severe usability issues, the nature of which have not been explored to date by the HCI community. This study evaluates the interactions between users and a broad sample of SSTs, details the usability issues that occurred, explores their connections and consequences, and presents a set of design considerations that may lead to their remediation.

Effective narrative visualization communicates information by integrating story-telling and data visualization in a comprehensible, compelling manner. The compelling aspect of effective narrative visualization consequentially results in the potential to shift the attitude of an audience. However, there is much to understand about how narrative visualization can best be designed to influence target audiences. This paper focuses on an empirical experiment where we examined the effects of two communication strategies - anthropomorphism and personal identification - on a young adult audience. In particular, we wanted to understand which strategy, when integrated into narrative visualization, can nudge a specific audience's attitude towards greater consideration in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic. Our results indicated that the personal identification communication strategy was the most successful in nudging participants. This study contributes a better grasp of how technologies such as narrative visualization, using different communication strategies, can deliver more targeted messaging.

Research reveals that managing mobile device use during family time can be a source of stress for parents. In particular, it can create conflict in their relationships. As such, there is a need to understand how these problematic experiences might be addressed by new approaches to technology design. This paper presents a study in which 14 parents were prompted to reflect on how their experiences and relationships could be improved by four design proposals. These proposals resulted from ideation workshops involving 12 professional designers, and were presented as scenario-based storyboards during interviews. Our interviews revealed three design approaches that appealed to parents. We describe seven benefits that parents imagined these approaches would have, and discuss ways in which they should be further explored. Thus, we contribute to a more complete understanding of how technology design might better support parents’ aspirations for how devices are used within the family.

Research reveals that family experiences of technology use in everyday life can be complex and messy, often associated with tension and conflict. This complexity can be intensified when sets of parents have differing individual perspectives on their family's technology use. Exploring these different perspectives, requires an approach that not only considers parents not only as individuals, but also as part of a set. To challenge matters further, parents may not be fully aware of their own attitudes and assumptions relating to technology, let alone of each other's. Parents may also be embarrassed to share details about family conflicts. This methods paper presents a probe study that successfully helped us to explore the individual perspectives on family technology use that exist within sets of parents. It provides an example of an approach to using probes that can reveal the hidden experiences of multiple individuals within a social context. In this way, it contributes an understanding of how we might interrogate the complexities of co-experience.

Iteration is a central feature of most HCI design methods, creating as it does opportunities for engagements with stakeholder groups. But what does iteration demand of those groups? Under what conditions do iterative engagements arise, and with what stakes? Building on experiences with Aboriginal Australian communities, and drawing on feminist and decolonial thinking, we examine the nature of iteration for HCI and how it frames encounters between design and use, with a focus on the affective dimension of engagement in iterative design processes.

Designing new technologies to support the lived experience of dementia is of increasing interest within HCI. While there is guidance on qualitative research methods to use in areas such as dementia, there is a need for more appropriate ways to research in the younger demographic. In Younger Onset Dementia (YOD), the circumstances and experiences are markedly different from dementia in the later stage of life requiring a different approach. This paper presents insights into the methods and approaches used in fieldwork with five people living with YOD; where they engaged as co-researchers in a co-directed inquiry into their lived experiences. Through this, we make a number of methodological contributions to HCI and Participatory Action Research (PAR) for research in the YOD setting. This includes productive approaches that are sensitive, respectful and empowering to the participants. It also extends current approaches to using probes in HCI and dementia research.

Recent advances of the affordable virtual reality headsets make virtual reality training an economical choice when compared to traditional training. However, these virtual reality devices present a range of different levels of virtual reality fidelity and interactions. Few works have evaluated their validity against the traditional training formats. This paper presents a study that compares the learning efficiency of a bimanual gearbox assembly task among traditional training, virtual reality training with direct 3D inputs (HTC VIVE), and virtual reality training without 3D inputs (Google Cardboard). A pilot study was conducted and the result shows that HTC VIVE brings the best learning outcomes.

This pictorial offers a visual diary of our qualitative fieldwork to understand ageing people's experiences in Saudi Arabia. It provides insights gained through conducting qualitative fieldwork with ageing Saudis. We present a range of cultural considerations that shaped the design of the fieldwork and highlight opportunities, challenges, and issues that we faced when conducting interviews and deploying research probes. In particular, we highlight the power and effectiveness of using probes to elicit participants' values, views and desires when working within the sociocultural norms of Saudi Arabia.

This is a methods paper that draws from our fieldwork conducted in Saudi Arabia to understand ageing people's experiences. This paper focuses on insights gained when using qualitative methods to understand the experiences of ageing Saudis. The aim is to highlight some of the cultural considerations, opportunities, challenges, and issues that influenced our approach and deployment of interviews and probes. Influences of social-cultural practices and religion led to interesting challenges for recruitment, conducting cross-gender communications, and how participants reported their experiences. This paper offers methodological considerations that include the influences of local culture, gender, religion, etc. We also discuss how we shaped our fieldwork tools based upon considerations of local cultural and religious contexts. In particular, we highlight the usefulness of probes in traversing cultural boundaries.

Music listening practices are changing. Mobile, networked devices now offer rich opportunities not just for personal music consumption but also for personally broadcasting music and for sharing digital meta-data concerning tastes, preferences and general listening habits. However, experiences of music listening and sharing on the move and how this has been impacted by developments in mobile technology remain under-explored. In this paper we present an empirical study of the sociality of mobile music experiences, "in the wild", using a new location-based mobile music-sharing application (Pocketsong), designed as a technology probe. We report users' experiences of Pocketsong (distilled from interviews), and critically examine the affordances of mobile music applications, the sociality of sharing and "co-listening", and the relationships between digitally-mediated mobile music consumption and self-expression. Based upon this we reflect upon the interaction design challenges of developing mobile music technologies that work in digitally-mediated social spaces.

Think-aloud protocols are commonly used to evaluate player experiences of video games but suffer from a lack of objectivity and timeliness. On the other hand, quantitative captures of physiological data are effective; providing detailed, unbiased and continuous responses of players, but lack contexts for interpretation. This paper documents how both approaches could be used together in practice by comparing video-cued retrospective think-aloud data and physiological data collected during a video gameplay experiment. We observed that many interesting physiological responses did not feature in participants' think-aloud data, and conversely, reports of interesting experiences were sometimes not observed in the collected physiological data. Through learnings from our experiment, we present some of the challenges when combining these approaches and offer some guidelines as to how qualitative and quantitative data can be used together to gain deeper insights into player experiences.

Music shapes our social lives. While previous research has provided a foundational understanding of the social affordances surrounding people's interactions with music, there is a need to update this understanding in light of recent key developments in our digital technological landscape. This paper describes a qualitative study of people's social activities and practices around music in households. It extends previous research by revealing the impact key technologies have on how, where, when, and with who people's interactions surrounding music occur. It also reveals people's creative attempts to design their musical experiences with others through reconfiguring and connecting to various digital technologies and digital platforms in order to pursue more opportunities for communicating, sharing, bonding, and celebrating lives with others.

Photography is now a highly automated activity where people enjoy phototaking by pointing and pressing a button. While this liberates people from having to interact with the processes of photography, e.g., controlling the parameters of the camera or printing images in the darkroom, we argue that an engagement with such processes can in fact enrich people's experience of phototaking. Drawing from fieldwork with members of a film-based photography club, we found that people who engage deeply with the various processes of phototaking experienced photography richly and meaningfully. Being able to participate fully in the entire process gave them a sense of achievement over the final result. Having the opportunity to engage with the process also allowed them to learn and hone their photographic skills. Through this understanding, we can imagine future technologies that enrich experiences of photography through providing the means to interact with photographic processes in new ways.

This workshop brings together a cross-disciplinary community of researchers and practitioners interested in participative practice and interactive systems design. The workshop addresses growing fascination with participation across interaction design, community informatics, the arts, science and social science, and asks workshop participants to reflect on the ethics and efficacy of the tools and methods used in these diverse practices. The aim of the workshop will be to map out a critical framework exploring the qualities of participation from multiple disciplines. The workshop outcomes will outline how cross-disciplinary perspectives on participation can contribute to participatory and user-centred interaction design.

People have reported encountering coincidences when using particular technologies to interact with personal digital content. However, to date, there is a paucity of research to understand these experiences. This article applies McCarthy and Wright's [2004; 2005] experiential framework to analyze these kinds of technology-mediated coincidences. By focusing upon encounters of coincidence during people's digital music listening, we identified the elements at play, elucidated the properties of the individual elements, their inter-relationships, and an understanding of how coincidences can arise. We also reveal how, under particular conditions, such elements provide people with opportunities to encounter coincidence. This understanding of coincidence demonstrates how McCarthy and Wright's [2004; 2005] framework can be usefully applied to an empirical investigation of user experience.

Many people today have access to enormous libraries of digital content. Increasingly these libraries contain personal content, consumed in support of people's non-instrumental needs. If current trends persist, these repositories will only increase. Having to choose from so much could be unpleasant especially in the absence of strong preferences. This raises some concerns for user experience (UX) design. Approaches for such interactions should not only be optimized for UX but must also support users' non-instrumental needs. People face this predicament during digital music listening and yet report positive experiences when listening in shuffle. Through an empirical study of digital music listening and close examination of people's listening practices and experiences, we argue that a shuffle-based approach--whereby people can abdicate choice to a random process while being able to modulate the randomness--not only mitigates the unpleasantness of choosing but also supports their non-instrumental needs while fostering desirable experiential outcomes.

Studies which I carried out recently of users of digital music players revealed that the element of randomness plays a role in influencing the user experience (UX). Apart from being generally positive, some users even report rich experiences such as serendipity. I propose a longitudinal study to further explicate the phenomena. In doing so, I aim to produce a theoretical framework which will provide a richer characterization of the randomness-influenced UX. This will add to our understanding of UX and may serve to inform designers of interactive systems on how randomness can be used as an innovative design resource for supporting rich and novel UX.

Randomness is being harnessed in the design of some interactive systems. This is observed in random blogs, random web searching, and in particular Apple's iPod Shuffle. Yet the role of randomness in design of interactive systems in not well understood. This paper reports on an empirical study examining the influence of randomness on the user experience of music listening. 113 instances of self-reporting were collected and analysed according to four themes: listening mode, content organisation, activities during listening, and affective outcomes. The analysis provides insights into how randomness is used to engender certain affective responses (such as feeling refreshed) by using various constraining techniques (such as playlists) whilst engaging in everyday activities (such as driving a car). The paper argues that randomness can be used as an innovative design resource for supporting rich and novel user experiences.