Prior research on participatory design of digital artefacts with children has been criticizing the often restricted scope of children’s involvement. Studies on comprehensive long-term participation and thus corresponding knowledge on the setup, organization, and overall success factors of participatory design projects with children are scarce. To address this gap, we present the case study of a nationwide three-year participatory app project on children’s rights in Switzerland. With overall more than 170 children involved in 18 different workshop formats, the project plays a pioneering role in continuous long-term participatory app design with children. Having analyzed various approaches and decisions in setting up the project, coordinating participants, planning and running workshops, etc., we were able to derive a set of recommendations for related project endeavors. Core success factors (and challenges) turned out to include building a basis of trust, achieving genuine participation, considering children’s diversity, and ensuring continuous communication with children involved.

Voice assistants (VAs), typically promoted as omniscient conversational butlers, still remain below users’ expectations. Interaction designers seem to struggle bringing in user perspectives necessary to develop more meaningful VA applications beyond simple use cases such as playing music. One of the reasons might be the immateriality of cloud-based VA technology making it difficult to comprehend such complex and ever-evolving systems. In this paper, we investigate provotyping as a design tool for ‘materialising the immaterial’. In our case study, teams of multidisciplinary experts devised twelve provotypes to explore intangible VA technology. We present and discuss three generalisations in respect to the role of provotypes for the exploration of VAs. Our findings show provotypes can serve as the necessary props by which we can bring in missing perspectives around this technology and generate material which enables designers to speculate, debate, and sketch out ideas for meaningful futures of VA applications.

Fueled by ongoing digitization efforts, manufacturing is currently undergoing a transformational process towards interconnected machinery and workforce, which enables a wide range of interactive monitoring and controlling applications. Whereas existing user-centered work addressed remote monitoring from office workplaces, it remains unclear how manufacturing workers experience and adopt machinery monitoring apps on mobile and wearable devices. To close this gap, we conducted a four-week field study in a running factory to study workers' overall user experience and acceptance of such monitoring apps, the subjective impact on their work routines, and their preferred device type. Under productive operation, 11 manufacturing workers used functional application prototypes on smartphones and smartwatches to receive notifications of machine incidents. In 22 individual interviews and two focus groups, we collected the participants' impressions and assessments. Based on these results, we derive a set of recommendations for designing and deploying machinery monitoring apps for manufacturing workers.

First consumer-facing apps for medical self-diagnosis through Artificial Intelligence have hit the market only recently. These promise to detect malicious skin changes from photos or respiratory diseases from cough noises captured by the smartphone microphone, for example. While there is a large body of research on HCI-related aspects of mobile health applications, knowledge about the user perceptions of such novel AI-driven self-diagnosis apps and factors affecting their acceptance and adoption is scarce. In an online survey, we investigated the participants’ overall willingness-to-use (considering four types of captured and processed data) and identified trust factors and desirable features. We found that more than half of the participants would use AI-driven self-diagnosis apps, yet mainly integrated into prevailing general practitioner care. Based on the results, we draw conclusions which can guide the design, development, and launch of AI-driven self-diagnosis apps.

No longer only experts are confronted with (semi-)automated systems, yet automation has founds its way into our everyday lifes in various forms and applications. Based on a thorough literature review, we introduce a design space for “everyday automation” to uncover eight core dimensions of respective systems. These dimensions include the domain, the task type, the type of user interaction, and the automation level, among others. Visualized as a “morphological box”, this design space is particularly supposed to support the ideation of novel automated systems for everyday life.

Automation is finding its way into many parts of everyday life. This is manifested by the increasing opportunities for end users to offload decisions to their home appliances, to hand over control to their cars, to step into automated trains, or to go for shopping at self-checkout stores. Supported by artificial intelligence, emerging automated services are getting closer towards human cognitive functions, as they are integrating analysis and decision based on the processing of large information sets [ 48 ]. In anticipation of the broad impact that these emerging technologies will have on our sphere of life, a reflective and systematic consideration is necessary that leverages their full potential in terms of user experience. While there is a long human factors research tradition on automation, scholars have for long concentrated on highly specialized professional work tasks for trained personnel, such as control center operators or pilots. With technological innovations and new use cases in domains such as transport, home automation, and retail, the goal of designing automation for a broader population has become more important. This transition of automation technology towards the everyday life thus has put the experience of “naïve users” into the center of attention.

Due the involved counselling activities, the profession of social work might provide a promising, yet so far uninvestigated application field for voice assistants. To explore requirements and barriers for voice-based services in the field of social work, we conducted focus group sessions with 41 professionals. During the group discussions and through a questionnaire, we collected requirements for applying voice assistants in this professional setting and corresponding application ideas. Overall, the participants expected a positive impact of voice assistants on their profession. While the protection of the clients' sensitive data and the risk of their reduced social interactions need to be considered, the participants saw high potential in documentation services and the cooperative guidance of clients by human professionals and voice assistants. Future research should investigate the design of this interplay and study appropriate handover strategies between human experts and virtual assistants for specific social work services.

Over the last few years, chatbots have become a common channel for customer service interactions. In contrast, their usage for in-company applications and respective scientific knowledge about so-called virtual enterprise assistants from a user perspective are still scarce. In this paper, we studied the acceptance and user experience of a chatbot for in-company IT support. In a user study, 12 employees of a bank and a hospital evaluated and assessed a respective chatbot prototype supporting three typical use cases. Our results indicate that such an in-company chatbot is well-suited for structured use cases, such as resetting a password and releasing an email attachment from quarantine. Participants appreciated the simplicity, the pro-active guidance and immediate feedback. The participants assessed a chatbot and the phone as preferred channels to the IT help desk.

While mobile gamified apps for language learning such as Duolingo are highly successful, knowledge about the use and suitability of such concepts for blended learning in schools is scarce. Pursuing a holistic approach, this work investigates the general requirements and acceptance of a modern gamified learning companion for traditional class-based teaching. We conducted several surveys with students, teachers and parents and studied the usage of a custom research prototype by 13/14-year-olds in three classes in English (as a foreign) language under real-world conditions. According to our results, all considered involved parties are positive about such a mobile learning companion when specific requirements are met. We did not observe any community-related negative impact such as teasing for bad results, for example, and conclude that the considered gamification features such as challenges with classmates and rankings are suitable for the investigated school context. Based on the results, we derive a set of guidelines for the design and development of a mobile learning companion, its introduction in class and its practical usage.

The meeting of pervasive screens and smart devices has witnessed the birth of screen-smart device interaction (SSI), a key enabler to many novel interactive use cases. Most current surveys focus on direct human-screen interaction, and to the best of our knowledge, none have studied state-of-the-art SSI. This survey identifies three core elements of SSI and delivers a timely discussion on SSI oriented around the screen, the smart device, and the interaction modality. Two evaluation metrics (i.e., interaction latency and accuracy) have been adopted and refined to match the evaluation criterion of SSI. The bottlenecks that hinder the further advancement of the current SSI in connection with this metrics are studied. Last, future research challenges and opportunities are highlighted in the hope of inspiring continuous research efforts to realize the next generation of SSI.

On-screen gamepads are increasingly used as controllers for video games on distant screens, yet lack the typical tactile feedback known from hardware controllers. We conducted a comparative lab study to investigate four smartphone gamepads inspired by traditional game controllers and mobile game controls (directional buttons, directional pad, floating joystick, tilt control). The study consisted of both completing a formal control test as well as controlling two popular video games of different genres ( Pac-Man and Super Mario Bros. ). The results indicate that the directional buttons require the most attention of the user, however, work precisely for direction-restricted navigational tasks. Directional pad and joystick showed a similar performance, yet they encourage drifting and unintended operations when the user is focused on the remote screen. While currently unfamiliar to many users, the floating joystick can reduce the glances at the device. Tilt turned out to be not sufficiently precise and quick for the investigated tasks. The article concludes with derived design guidelines with easily realizable measures for typical contexts such as casual gaming at home or spontaneous gaming on public displays.

Interactive opinion polls are a promising novel use case for public urban displays. However, voicing one's opinion at such a public installation poses special privacy requirements. In this paper, we introduce our ongoing work on investigating the roles of the interaction technique and the poll question in this novel context. We present a field study comparing three different voting techniques (public touch interface, personal smartphone by scanning a QR code, from remote through a short Web address) and three types of poll questions (general, personal, local). Overall, the results show that actively casting an opinion on a timely topic is highly appreciated by passers-by. The public voting opportunity through a touch screen is clearly preferred. Offering mobile or remote voting does not significantly increase the overall participation rate. The type of poll question has an impact on the number of participants but does not influence the preferred interaction modality.

BACKGROUND: Cancer immunotherapy has recently entered a remarkable renaissance phase with the approval of several agents for treatment. Cancer treatment platforms have demonstrated profound tumor regressions including complete cure in patients with metastatic cancer. Moreover, technological advances in next-generation sequencing (NGS) as well as the development of devices for scanning whole-slide bioimages from tissue sections and image analysis software for quantitation of tumor-infiltrating lymphocytes (TILs) allow, for the first time, the development of personalized cancer immunotherapies that target patient specific mutations. However, there is currently no bioinformatics solution that supports the integration of these heterogeneous datasets. RESULTS: We have developed a bioinformatics platform - Personalized Oncology Suite (POS) - that integrates clinical data, NGS data and whole-slide bioimages from tissue sections. POS is a web-based platform that is scalable, flexible and expandable. The underlying database is based on a data warehouse schema, which is used to integrate information from different sources. POS stores clinical data, genomic data (SNPs and INDELs identified from NGS analysis), and scanned whole-slide images. It features a genome browser as well as access to several instances of the bioimage management application Bisque. POS provides different visualization techniques and offers sophisticated upload and download possibilities. The modular architecture of POS allows the community to easily modify and extend the application. CONCLUSIONS: The web-based integration of clinical, NGS, and imaging data represents a valuable resource for clinical researchers and future application in medical oncology. POS can be used not only in the context of cancer immunology but also in other studies in which NGS data and images of tissue sections are generated. The application is open-source and can be downloaded at http://www.icbi.at/POS.

Modern handheld devices can act as “magic lenses” for public displays and enable camera-based real-time interaction with their contents, thus allowing for manifold interactive applications in public space. To learn more about the characteristics of common techniques and to provide guidelines for new ones, a comparative user study was conducted. With regard to two basic task types (selection and translation) and two typical devices (smartphone and tablet), three interaction techniques in-depth were evaluated: direct touch-based input (Touch), cross-hair targeting (Target), and a new technique based on a dynamic cross-hair on the screen that snaps to visible nearby screen objects (Snap Target). The study results indicate that successful interaction with the Touch technique strongly depends on the usage context: Although Touch enables fast selection, it incurs many errors when small targets have to be selected on a smartphone. Target supports such difficult selections better, but Snap Target proved to be most robust in both investigated task types. Also, users stated that they felt best supported by the latter technique. Cross-hair-based techniques, especially Snap Target, were found to be well suitable for scenarios where several device types need to be supported under similar conditions. Implications and further work are discussed.

Traffic information from diverse transportation domains is increasingly becoming interlinked and accessible in real-time. Upcoming intermodal transportation services could advise drivers to change to a public transportation means, especially in case of severe congestions on the road. We present a road user study with 52 participants with an in-car intermodal routing prototype that gained first empirical evidence on the user requirements in such scenarios. We found that a considerable number of recommendations for modal shifts to public transit were actually accepted by the drivers. In-car inquiry results highlight that decision-making under such complex time-constrained conditions needs to be supported by a considerable amount of updated, detailed and valid information about time savings, pricing, connections and also the actual route situation ahead. We show that the presentation of such large amounts of information should be feasible without categorical safety losses, even with small-screen devices (such as smartphones). To guide further development, related design experiences with regard to presentation modality, system input, and screen design are shared.

As everyday companions, smartphones are well-suited tools for controlling interactive applications on large public displays. To allow concurrent interaction by multiple users beyond traditional collaborative scenarios we introduce the idea of virtually augmented public screens for creating personalized views and thus literally enabling "private public screens". We present a fully functional research prototype in form of a Video Wall application and report on first experiences gathered from a comparative user study. The results show that the proposed personalized Augmented Reality approach, which allows each user to have a private view on the public display, is preferred over a purely competitive mode, where the public display is shared between the users. Further, our study shows that social activity indicators informing about the activities of other users are well appreciated.

Today's in-car information systems are undergoing an evolution towards realistic visualization as well as to real-time telematics services. In a road study with 31 participants we explored the communication of safety information to the driver. We compared three presentation styles: audio-only, audiovisual with a conventional map, and audiovisual with augmented reality. The participants drove on a motorway route and were confronted with recommendations for route following, speed limitation, lane utilization, unexpected route change, and emergency stops. We found significant differences between these safety scenarios in terms of driving performance, eye glances and subjective preference. Comparing the presentation styles, we found that following such recommendations was highly efficient in the audio-only mode. Additional visual information did not significantly increase driving performance. As our subjective preference data also shows, augmented reality does not necessarily create an added value when following safety-related traffic recommendations. However, additional visual information did not interfere with safe driving. Importantly, we did not find evidence for a higher distraction potential by augmented reality; drivers even looked slightly less frequently on the human-machine interface screen in the augmented reality mode than with conventional maps.

The vision-based detection of hand gestures is one technological enabler for Natural User Interfaces which try to provide a natural and intuitive interaction with computers. In particular, mobile devices might benefit from such a less device-centric but more natural input possibility. In this paper, we introduce our ongoing work on the visual markerless detection of fingertips on mobile devices. Further, we shed light on the potential of mobile hand gesture detection and present several promising use cases and respective demo applications based on the presented engine.

Using mobile devices for exploring and interacting with the user's physical environment is among the most promising candidates for commercially successful future telecommunication services and applications. This trend is confirmed by the rollout of latest mobile phones equipped with advanced navigation features like built-in GPS receivers, digital compasses and acceleration sensors. The increasing technological potential of Mobile Spatial Interaction (MSI), however, requires a wider comprehension of appropriate visualization possibilities for spatially referenced content in the field of Mobile Human-Computer Interaction.In this paper, we argue for an integrated approach comprising innovations in MSI with latest advances in visualization. In order to demonstrate the potential of this joint approach, we present a series of three related projects and highlight in each case research challenges and results in the field of Mobile HCI and mobile appli-cation development as well as corresponding advances of the underlying server-side rendering algorithms.