The increasing digitalization heighten the demand for intuitive and enjoyable interactions between humans and technology, facilitating broader participation in social and economic activities for as many individuals as possible. This requires a comprehensive understanding of Usability and User Experience and effective Design methods to transform insights into successful interfaces and usage scenarios. Design, User Experience and Usability (DUXU) is one of the affiliated conferences of HCI International. It was established 2011 by Aaron Marcus and contributed over the past 13 years 2253 papers to the HCI field. An analysis of these papers can provide valuable insights into important topics and trends concerning Design, User Experience and Usability in HCI. Topics and trends are identified by an analysis of the keywords and full texts of the published papers. The most frequent topics are described by selected papers. Finally, we try to derive some insights about future trends from these results.

This paper describes the motivation, framework, concepts, method, implementation, and results of the HCII2023 Design Café, a dedicated participatory highly interactive design workshop held in Copenhagen in July 2023. Motivated by the ubiquitous challenges our world is facing, this initiative had the goal to explore six main issues from an interdisciplinary perspective with a focus on the UN SDG 11: “Sustainable Cities and Communities” and the HCI Grand Challenge 2 “Human-Environment Interactions.” The six issues were formulated as questions and presented to the participants working in small groups. (1) How to create inclusive and ethical smart cities? (2) How to establish trust between people and smart environments? (3) How to address privacy concerns in smart environments that adopt the “disappearing computer” paradigm? (4) How to promote explainability and transparency of policies and measures to citizens of smart cities or in smart environments in general? (5) How to design incentives and rewards for engagement and sustainable behavior in smart cities at a personal as well as collective/corporate level? (6) How to measure success and impact in sustainable smart city projects? The method and approach of the Design Café is a tailored composition of a guided, structured format combined with and inspired by processes of informal communication and exchange of knowledge and ideas. Aligned moderation, a minimum set of rules, a set of relevant topics and an interdisciplinary group of motivated participants working in rotating formations provides the structure for achieving results. The results show that the six issues are not independent of each other, but require a holistic view, considering the various dependencies as well as synergies when exploring solutions. Nevertheless, the importance of first establishing higher-level goals based on ethical and inclusive approaches fostering human dignity and human rights were key. Acceptance of overall goals, processes, rules, and regulations was considered as the fundamental pre-requisite for sustainable change towards a declared goal. Acceptance needs trust and privacy as well as explainability and transparency of policies and measures. The role of incentives and rewards for engagement and sustainable behavior was twofold. Offering incentives must include planning on how to measure their impact. Effective measurement of success and impact depends heavily on how the institutions address privacy. Explainability and transparency should become one of the ethical guidelines that steer and control concepts, decision making, and implementations of all activities. The scale of these societal challenges still needs to be recognized by those responsible. It is essential to educate decision makers in the psychological needs and effects of sense making, comprehensibility, and finally acceptance and well-being moving towards a humanity-centered design.

Usability is the key to making future technology useful to the world, yet it is often ignored. This workshop will introduce Usability, and brainstorm ways to incorporate it into UN SDGs. One example is our effort to add World Usability Day (WUD) to the UN calendar. We will explore implications for technology design for the Global South. We will also identify concrete next steps that we all can take to advance Usability worldwide.

How can a new user learn an unfamiliar application, especially if it is a high-functionality (hi-fun) application, like Photoshop, Excel, or programming language IDEfi Many applications provide introductory videos, illustrative examples, and documentation on individual operations. Tests show, however, that novice users are likely to ignore the provided help, and try to learn by exploring the application first. In a hi-fun application, though, the user may lack understanding of the basic concepts of an application's operation, even though they were likely explained in the (ignored) documentation. This paper introduces steptorials ("stepper tutorials"), a new interaction strategy for learning hi-fun applications. A steptorial aims to teach the user how to work through a simple, but nontrivial, example of using the application. Steptorials are unique because they allow varying the autonomy of the user at every step. A steptorial has a control structure of a reversible programming language stepper. The user may choose, at any time, to be shown how to do a step, be guided through it, use the application interface without constraint, or to return to a previous step. It reduces the risk in either trying new operations yourself, or conversely, the risk of ceding control to the computer. It introduces a new paradigm of mixed-initiative learning of application interfaces.