Typing on a smartwatch presents significant challenges due to several factors, including the small size of these devices, the lack of tactile feedback, and the fat finger problem. This study presents an empirical analysis of two distinct text-entry methods for a one-line QWERTY keyboard: a traditional touch-based interaction and an input technique that leverages the rotary-crown, a feature commonly found on a substantial number of smartwatch devices. Interaction via the rotating crown enables text entry even when touch input is impractical—such as when wearing gloves, in wet conditions, or in cases of reduced precision like the ’fat finger’ problem. By rotating the rotary-crown, the user can navigate to and select the desired character, which is then input by pressing the corresponding key to confirm the selection. The method was evaluated in comparison to the touch-interaction: the results demonstrated that participants achieved higher accuracy with the rotary-crown input, with a Total Error Rate of 9%; conversely, participants exhibited faster performance with the touch-interaction, achieving a typing speed of 9.3 words per minute.

Abstract The purpose of this paper is to assess the effects that the COVID-19 pandemic caused in the human–computer interaction (HCI) research field. Specifically, we aim to investigate how the HCI empirical research methodology changed due to the restrictions caused by COVID-19. For this reason, we analyzed all the papers published in the 2021 edition of The ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI 2021), which is generally considered the premier international conference for the field of HCI. Through the analysis of CHI papers, we identified four main effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on HCI research: influence on participants; influence on apparatus; influence on experiment procedure; other influences. These effects are described in detail and broken down into additional subcategories. Moreover, papers on pandemic-related topics were also identified. In addition, we performed some comparisons with the previous and successive edition of the conference, and extended some analysis, e.g categorization, to CHI 2022 papers. The analysis found that 23% of CHI 2021 papers and 36% of CHI 2022 papers reported some influences of the pandemic, the most common being a change in the procedures researchers used to interact with participants in their studies, in most cases based on remote communication technologies.

We present a technique that aims to make text editing on smartphones more efficient. One of the main difficulties of editing on smartphones is the cursor positioning since the characters are usually smaller than the user finger, and for this reason a number of editing techniques have been proposed. Our technique is primarily designed to help the user position the cursor in the desired location: after the user has tapped on the text to position the cursor, soft keys with directional arrows appear on the screen and allow the user to move the cursor by tapping on them. Moreover, in addition to cursor placement, the technique also allows to perform the main editing operations through additional dedicated buttons for select/cut/copy/paste.

Abstract In this paper, we present ParVis, an interactive visual system for the animated visualization of logged parser trace executions. The system allows a parser implementer to create a visualizer for generated parsers by simply defining a JavaScript module that maps each logged parser instruction into a set of events driving the visual system interface. The result is a set of interacting graphical/text windows that allows users to explore logged parser executions and helps them to have a complete understanding of how the parser behaves during its execution on a given input. We used our system to visualize the behavior of textual as well as visual parsers and describe here two of these uses. Moreover, in order to validate the efficacy of our system, we ran a user experiment where students analyzed a CUP-generated parser both with ParVis, instantiated to LALR parsers, and the standard CUP debug facilities. The results show that students can indeed analyze parser behavior and find mistakes in parser specifications more easily and quickly using ParVis. In particular, in some parser design tasks, using ParVis participants achieved a higher success rate of 50% in 42% less time with respect to the baseline system.

Abstract In this article, we present PolyRec Gesture Design Tool (PolyRec GDT), a tool that allows the definition of gesture sets for mobile applications. It supports the entire process of designing gesture sets, from collecting gestures to analyzing and exporting the set created for use in a mobile application. It is equipped with the PolyRec gesture recognizer, a unistroke recognizer based on template matching with good accuracy and performances while still allowing support for other recognizers. The main features of PolyRec GDT include the ability to collect gestures directly on mobile devices, to detect similarities between gestures to help the designer to detect ambiguities in the design phase, and the ability to automatically select the most representative gestures for each gesture class by using a clustering technique to increase recognition speed without affecting accuracy. Experimental results show that this latter feature allows an increase in accuracy compared with when the same operation is performed manually by developers or randomly by software. Finally, a user study was carried out to evaluate PolyRec GDT, in which participants were asked to use it to add gesture functionality to a mobile application. The results showed that with the support of PolyRec GDT this operation took only a few minutes for participants with mobile development experience, whereas it would have taken much longer without the support of PolyRec GDT.

In this paper, we present Domus, an educational game for multi-touch tables that makes use of a Tangible User Interface (TUI). In particular, it uses as game pieces physical objects called tangibles, which have conductive feet arranged in different patterns so that the device can recognize their position/rotation.

In this paper, we present ParVis, an interactive visual system for the animated visualization of logged parser trace executions. The system allows a parser implementer to create a visualizer for generated parsers by simply defining a JavaScript module that maps each logged parser instruction into a set of events driving the visual system interface. The result is a set of interacting graphical/text windows that allows users to explore logged parser executions and helps them to have a complete understanding of how the parser behaves during its execution on a given input.

We present the design and the evaluation of a soft keyboard aimed at facilitating the input of programming code on mobile devices equipped with touch screens, such as tablets and smartphones. Besides the traditional tap on a key interaction, the keyboard allows the user to draw gestures on top of it. The gestures correspond to shortcuts to enter programming statements/constructs or to activate specific keyboard sub-layouts. The keyboard was compared in a user study to a traditional soft keyboard with a QWERTY layout and to another state-of-art keyboard designed for programming. The results show a significant advantage for our design in terms of speed and gesture per characters.

The results of an experimental study on handwriting on smartwatches are described in this study. This study aims to gain knowledge on the current practice and possible future developments on smartwatches. This includes two experiments: the first experiment aims to compare a state-of-the-art commercial handwriting system to other competing text entry methods based on soft keyboards, whereas the other experiment allows us to gather some useful information regarding users' performance and preference in an ideal setting (without character recognition), so as to direct the design of future handwriting applications on small devices. In the first experiment, we obtained an initial entry speed of 7.5 wpm, lower than that of the other compared methods. The performance obtained in the second experiment, in the range of 15-19 wpm, suggests that by appropriately changing some settings (e.g., improved recognition and feedback, preferred writing style, and spare of space characters), the entry speed can be significantly increased. The results also showed that users prefer to enter uppercase characters and that, although this style of writing requires a significantly greater number of gestures per character, it does not adversely affect the writing speed.

We present a software system aimed at providing support to the management of processes for the self evaluation of the quality of degree programmes. The system was developed for quality management at the University of Salerno, Italy. Its main functionalities include: monitoring of the process status, scheduling of meetings, document management, support for working groups. With the help of some screenshots, the main features will be described in the context of scenarios that commonly arise in the management of processes of self-assessment of quality.

We present a novel gesture recognizer suitable for fast prototyping of gesture-based applications. The recognizer uses a nearest neighbor approach, and requires a small number of samples for each class. The similarity between two gestures is calculated through a three steps procedure: firstly, each gesture is approximated to a polyline, in order to extract its main movements; then, the two polylines are aligned to obtain an equal number of segments from both of them; lastly, the distance is found by summing the contribution of each pair of segments. We tested the recognizer on two different datasets and found that it performs more accurately than a state-of-art method.

KeyScretch is a text entry method for devices equipped with touch-screens, based on a menu-augmented soft keyboard. In these keyboards, a menu containing a small number of frequent characters is shown, while a key is pressed, allowing further character entry by menu selection. KeyScretch improves the previously studied menu-based methods by enabling the interpretation of compound strokes, which allow the input of text chunks longer than two characters. The performance of the method is analyzed on different kinds of touch-screens: First, we present a 25-session user study on a stylus-based device, showing that an instance of the method optimized for Italian can be learned in a reasonable time by the users and significantly outperforms the traditional method based on the tapping interaction. Then, we define and validate a model for predicting expert text entry rates on finger-based devices. The predicted rates for instances of KeyScretch optimized for different Western languages vary from about 44-50 words/min on the Qwerty layout, enabling improvements in the range of 30-49% as compared with the traditional method.

We describe the design and evaluation of a gestural text editing technique for touchscreen devices. The gestures are drawn on top of the soft keyboard and interpreted as commands for moving the caret, performing selections, and controlling the clipboard. Our implementation is an Android service that can be used in any text editing task on Android-based devices. We conducted an experiment to compare the gestural editing technique against the widget-based technique available on a smartphone (Samsung Galaxy II with Android 2.3.5). The results show a performance benefit of 13-24% for the gestural technique depending on the font size. Subjective feedback from the participants was also positive. Because the two editing techniques use different input areas, they can co-exist on a device. This means that the gestural editing can be added on any soft keyboard without interfering with user experience for those users that choose not to use it.

Auto completion has proven effective in various text-based applications. Conversely, no experiments have been carried out on the automatic completion of hand-drawn symbols and only a few systems have been presented in the literature for this purpose. Nevertheless, such a feature might be useful in different domains, e.g. for accelerating symbol retrieval and for launching complex gestural commands. In this paper we present a user study aimed at evaluating the human performance in hand-drawn symbol auto completion. In particular, using a set of more than 100 symbols belonging to the Military Course of Action domain, we evaluated the conditions under which the users are willing to exploit the auto completion functionality and those under which they can use it efficiently. As a result, we obtained that in a drawing task the auto completion functionality can be used in a profitable way, with a drawing time saving of about 18%.

Euler diagrams (EDs) are a popular means of visualizing set-based relationships. We describe the advancement of EulerSketch, based on a novel encoding of EDs. In particular, EulerSketch allows a user to sketch and interact with EDs and automatically produce a code representation for them. It also enables code storage and retrieval and permits to automatically re-draw an ED from its code representation. Some features are inspired by earlier works [4, 6, 3].

We present a code which captures the topology of closed-curve based diagrams (e.g. Euler diagrams (EDs) are used to visualize set-based relationships, whilst knot diagrams represent knotted structures), often used in visual languages. We briefly indicate how to construct a diagram from such a code. Furthermore, we present an interactive software artefact with a human-centric focus, permitting users the freedom to construct and transform diagrams at either the diagram or the code level, implementing algorithmic procedures developed.

We present a video game to learn the KeyScretch text entry method. The typing game helps the users to learn the method while having fun, letting them practice on the most frequent gestures associated to text and reach an acceptable expertise level.

KeyScretch is a recently proposed text entry method which makes use of gestures to input frequent word chunks on a menu-augmented soft keyboard. Each gesture is initiated on a key and is driven by the key surrounding menu. In this paper we present the performance of an instance of the method with a 4-items menu, specifically designed for the Italian language. The study shows that the method is easy to learn and significantly outperforms the traditional tapping-based method on the QWERTY layout.

Although textual interfaces for browsing scientific papers have several drawbacks, they are still the most used in digital libraries. Several visual approaches have been proposed in recent years in order to provide the user with a deeper insight of the search context and to allow him/her to quickly gather a collection of documents judged as useful for his/her research. This paper presents CyBiS, a novel 3D analytical interface for a Bibliographic Visualization Tool with the objective of improving scientific paper search. The design choices are justified on the basis of previous experiences described in literature and its effectiveness is shown through the description of an example session.

The progress achieved in the field of computer vision and the great improvement and diffusion of mobile technologies enable the exploration of new models of human-computer interaction, especially with respect to Augmented Reality (AR) scenarios. On the other hand, the lack of rapid prototyping environments for the development and testing of new systems of AR and Mixed Reality, may slow down the process of adoption of these technologies. This document, based on the state of the art of AR technology and on particular of AR development tools, describes the work in progress for the definition of a tool for the rapid prototyping of applications using mobile devices. The scope of the tool is twofold: to simplify the business development and simulation process of specific scenarios and to provide a tool to support the analysis of the quality of human interactions in AR environments.

In the field of syntactic recognition of hand-drawn visual languages, the recognition of the relations among graphical symbols is one of the first important tasks to be accomplished and is usually reduced to recognize the attachment areas of each symbol and the relations among them. In this paper we present an approach for identifying attachment areas on sketched symbols. The approach is independent from the method used to recognize symbols and assumes that the symbol has already been recognized. The approach is evaluated through a user study aimed at comparing the attachment areas detected by the system to those devised by the users. The results show that the system can identify attachment areas with a reasonable accuracy.

In this paper we present a visual system for the analysis of user behaviour during the execution of Web tasks based on visual data mining techniques. In particular, our system presents a suite of charts providing views of user behaviour starting from the well known clickstream visualization down to single user page interaction visualizations. The navigation through the views is enabled through ad-hoc defined zoom and filter operations. We give an overview of the architecture of the prototypical system and, in order to demonstrate the effectiveness of the approach and to give the reader an insight of the possible analysis types, we present a comparative analysis of an usability test performed on the two popular Web sites for booking flights.

We present an approach and a system to let tutors monitor several important aspects related to online tests, such as learner behavior and test quality. The approach includes the logging of important data related to learner interaction with the system during the execution of online tests and exploits data visualization to highlight information useful to let tutors review and improve the whole assessment process. We have focused on the discovery of behavioral patterns of learners and conceptual relationships among test items. Furthermore, we have led several experiments in our faculty in order to assess the whole approach. In particular, by analyzing the data visualization charts, we have detected several previously unknown test strategies used by the learners. Last, we have detected several correlations among questions, which gave us useful feedbacks on the test quality.

The term computer managed instruction (CMI) often refers to a set of functionalities which allow learning objects to be launched in the learning management system and to exchange data with it. A framework for the support of CMI functionalities in learning management systems, named CMIFramework, has been developed at the University of Salerno. In this paper, we present two case studies concerning the adoption of CMI functionalities, using CMIFramework, in different e-learning contexts. Our present work is aimed at demonstrating the ease in using the framework and its power in solving several problems connected to the adoption of CMI functionalities

Standardization efforts in e-learning are aimed at achieving interoperability among Learning Management Systems (LMSs) and Learning Object (LO) authoring tools. Some of the specifications produced have reached quite a good maturity level and have been adopted in software systems. Some others, such as SCORM Run-Time Environment (RTE), have not reached the same success, probably due to their intrinsic difficulty in being understood adequately and implemented properly. The SCORM RTE defines a set of functionalities which allow LOs to be launched in the LMS and to exchange data with it. Its adoption is crucial in the achievement of full interoperability among LMSs and LO authoring tools. In order to boost the adoption of SCORM RTE in LMSs, we propose a Service Oriented Architecture (SOA)-based reference model for offering the SCORM RTE functionalities as a service, external to the LMS. By externalizing functionalities from LMSs, our model encourages the independent development of e-learning system components, allowing e-learning software producers to gain several benefits, such as better software re-use and easier integration and complexity management, with a consequent cost reduction. The proposed model is validated through a prototype system, in which a popular LMS, developed with PHP language, is enhanced with the support of SCORM RTE functionalities, provided by an external Web service based on Java technology.