The 36th International British Computer Society Human Computer Interaction Conference took place at the University of York in the U.K. on the and August 28 and 29, 2023. The conference was co-located with INTERACT 2023, the 19th International Conference of Technical Committee 13 (Human–Computer Interaction [HCI]) of the International Federation for Information Processing. A selection of the best papers from that conference was published in Interacting with Computers earlier this year (Volume 37, Issue 3, May 2025). This special issue showcases a selection of the most compelling contributions from the recent HCI Conference, which featured 42 full paper presentations. The papers included here were chosen based on reviewers’ evaluations of the pre-conference manuscripts and the audience’s assessment of both the research and its presentation at the conference. Authors of the selected papers were invited to revise, deepen, and expand their work, resulting in the eight diverse articles included in this issue.

Welcome to Volume 36 of Interacting with Computers. As the Editor-in-Chief, Helen is thrilled to start this volume by introducing a new era for our journal. I stepped into this role during the COVID-19 pandemic, which was a difficult period in every respect, but thankfully things are now settling down. As we are able to get back to face-to-face work in human–computer interaction (HCI), in teaching, research and practice, I am excited to embrace new opportunities for the journal. I am also delighted to introduce Carine Lallemand as Deputy Editor of the journal. Carine joined the journal last year, and together, we have been working on a series of innovations for the journal, which we start rolling out in this volume. We extend our gratitude to our editorial board members for their support of these developments, to all authors who submit their contributions to the journal and to the many people who review papers.

In applications such as end-to-end encrypted instant messaging, secure email, and device pairing, users need to compare key fingerprints to detect impersonation and adversary-in-the-middle attacks. Key fingerprints are usually computed as truncated hashes of each party’s view of the channel keys, encoded as an alphanumeric or numeric string, and compared out-of-band, e.g. manually, to detect any inconsistencies. Previous work has extensively studied the usability of various verification strategies and encoding formats, however, the exact effect of key fingerprint length on the security and usability of key fingerprint verification has not been rigorously investigated. We present a 162-participant study on the effect of numeric key fingerprint length on comparison time and error rate. While the results confirm some widely-held intuitions such as general comparison times and errors increasing significantly with length, a closer look reveals interesting nuances. The significant rise in comparison time only occurs when highly similar fingerprints are compared, and comparison time remains relatively constant otherwise. On errors, our results clearly distinguish between security non-critical errors that remain low irrespective of length and security critical errors that significantly rise, especially at higher fingerprint lengths. A noteworthy implication of this latter result is that Signal / WhatsApp key fingerprints provide a considerably lower level of security than usually assumed.

The coronavirus pandemic drastically changed the lives of people across the globe. It affected almost every aspect of our lives including work, education, entertainment and social life. Although it is beginning to feel like a nightmare that perhaps we imagined, the consequences, largely negative, but a few positive, are still echoing around the world. Many people lost their lives or their livelihoods, many people still have long COVID and there were many other negative consequences. On the more positive side, the pandemic revolutionized remote working, shifted healthcare more rapidly to remote methods and enhanced digital communications, topics very relevant to human–computer interaction (HCI). For HCI, the pandemic had a profound effect on the way we work, in terms of practice, research and education. For long weeks and months, many of us were unable to meet face-to-face with clients, users, participants and students. This meant we had to change the way we worked, conducted research and educated the future generations of HCI and UX practitioners, researchers and educators. But HCI also has considerable potential to contribute to adjusting to life during a pandemic and in a post-pandemic world. As many people have noted, the pandemic would have been much more difficult without digital technologies that allowed many of us to work or study remotely, to stay in touch with family and friends, to consult our medical practitioner, to exercise, entertain ourselves and so on. A wider range of people needed digital technologies than ever before, and new systems needed to be created or adapted very quickly. There were some surprises, such as the sudden usefulness of QR codes, security concerns about many digital platforms (who had heard of ‘Zoombombing’ before the pandemic?) and the even greater explosion of disinformation and misinformation about issues such as the causes and cures for COVID-19 and the safety of vaccines. Without good interactive systems we would not have achieved what we were able to in the long weeks and months of lockdowns, but perhaps better designed interactive systems could have helped prevent the spread of disinformation and misinformation during that time. This special issue of Interacting with Computers addresses both aspects of HCI and the pandemic: how has the pandemic changed practice, research and education in HCI; and how has HCI contributed to solutions, and how can it continue to contribute to solutions as we move through the post-pandemic world. Sixteen papers were selected from more than 40 submissions for the special issue, with authors from 16 different countries covering Asia, Australasia, Europe and both North and South America. Papers cover a broad range of topics, and as we anticipated, address both how we can do HCI research in remote contexts and how HCI can help understand and solution the issues thrown up by this unprecedented context of social isolation. Three papers explored the theme of how we can do HCI research in this remote context. Correa et al. (this issue) and Verma (this issue) explored particular studies conducted remotely and Costagliola et al. (this issue) conducted a survey of how research report in the CHI conference changed in methods due to the pandemic. Another group of papers explored how to use HCI research methods to investigate problems arising from the pandemic, and remote work and study in particular. Turner and Ordonia (this issue) investigated how social media posts can be used as an indirect measure of well-being, by comparing the content of posts before and during the pandemic, while Suhaimi et al. (this issue) investigated the relationship between social media use and people’s intention to get vaccinated against COVID-19. Guidi et al. (this issue) investigated another aspect of social media use during the pandemic, that of the support it offered people with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) and those caring for these individuals. A large group of papers explored how interactive technologies could be deployed to address the problems that arose from the pandemic and understand the issues of using them. Stenkamp et al. (this issue) conducted research on how immersive video could be used to study whether pedestrians would follow distancing measures in public spaces and Hespanhol (this issue) explored how physical, virtual and hybrid public spaces can be designed to meet distancing and other requirements. Colombo et al. (this issue) explored how digital technologies can support the rapid design of new systems to cope with emergencies such as the pandemic. Rogers et al. (this issue) proposed different ways in which videoconferencing systems could be further developed to create a better experience for remote meeting participants. Barry and Kane (this issue) investigated the problems of remote working for global teams, a problem already before the pandemic, but one which it brought into focus. Gulliksen et al. (this issue) also investigated the effects of remote work, this time in the context of high education. Qin et al. (this issue) investigated a more specific education issue, that of students multitasking during online courses. Gould et al. (this issue) tackled the ongoing problem of how to measure the effectiveness of working remotely in ways acceptable to workers. This is clearly one of many issues accelerated by the pandemic that need further research. Ryan et al. (this issue) also explored a very contentious issue that emerged during the pandemic, the use of digital COVID certificates and the fairness of their use. Finally, Dix et al. (this issue) tackled the very large problem of the difficulties of understanding complex global issues such as the pandemic or the climate crisis and how we can use digital technologies better in supporting decision-making about these issues. As the COVID-19 pandemic hopefully recedes into history, we can see that these papers raise many interesting issues for us to contemplate and research. The pandemic made us consider the ways we work, research, study and relax and how digital technologies support all these activities. It brought some issues that were building into sharp focus and raised new ones due to the particular circumstances we found ourselves in. Hopefully, another situation like this will never occur again, but let us make sure we consider the lessons of this situation so we are better prepared if it does re-occur.

Passwords remain the most common form of authentication in the digital world. People have increasing numbers of passwords, and many people undertake risky password management behaviours such as re-using passwords, writing them down and sharing them. It is unclear whether people persist in these behaviours because they do not understand the risks involved or the benefits of the behaviour outweigh the risk. Two studies investigated the relationships between people's perceptions of the risks and benefits of a range of password management behaviours and their self-reports of their likelihood of undertaking them. The first study involved 120 MTurkers in the U.S.A., the second study involved 128 respondents from 26 different countries including approximately 50% students. In both studies, respondents took rated the risks, benefits and likelihood of undertaking 15 password management behaviours. The two very different samples provided very similar results, validating our classification of password management behaviours into four components: Storing, Sharing, Loggingn and Change behaviours. Somecomponents were more affected by perceptions of the benefits, others were equally affected by the perceptions of the risks and the benefits. These results have implications for how information about risky password behaviours is presented to users and general education about password security.

A study was undertaken with 189 young computer science students to assess whether as future developers of technologies for older people, they have ageist and sexist attitudes about people as users of technology. They were shown a picture of either a young or old woman or man and asked to assess the likelihood that this person would use a desktop computer, laptop computer and a smartphone, and their level of expertise in each of these technologies. The results showed that the students did have negative perceptions of the older people in comparison to young people. They also thought that women were less expert with the technologies than men, although there was no difference in the likelihood of them using the technology. However, there was no evidence of a “double standard” of older women being perceived particularly negatively.

Abandonment of assistive technologies (ATs) is a serious problem – rates of abandonment can be high, 78% has been reported for hearing aids. The paper argues for the importance of studying the abandonment of ATs by collecting real-time data about the use and non-use of ATs in the lived experience of their users. In the AART-BC Project, we are studying the use and abandonment of mobility ATs including wheelchairs, walkers and prostheses. We present two apps, ESMMobilityAT and ProbMobilityAT to facilitate the collection of real-time data about mobility AT use and problems encountered with these ATs. ESMMobilityAT is based on the experience sampling method (ESM) and asks mobility AT users to answer a short questionnaire about their AT use seven times a day. ProbMobilityAT allows mobility AT users to report problems with their AT when they occur. The apps have been successfully piloted on Android and IOS smartphones, although a number of problems with deployment have been highlighted. They will now be used in a field study with mobility AT uses and can be adapted for other AT domains.

Abstract Higher and further education providers are facing the challenge of supporting the interaction needs of an increasing number of students who feature accessibility preferences to use both elearning contents and services. In the next future, we can expect that, within adaptive elearning systems, both automatic and manual procedures will interoperate to elicit users' interaction needs for ensuring accessibility. In this paper, we report findings from the user experience with the self‐assessment of interaction needs, as part of a content personalization system, which tackles possible mismatches in the interaction between the user and the learning objects. All stakeholders involved in providing this service along with intended user groups (students with visual, auditory or mobility impairments, and without impairments) participated in the evaluation with over 100 users described in this paper. From the evaluation, results follow that our approach allows students to self‐assess and report adequately their interaction preferences. Furthermore, the paper describes findings of interest and open issues about how massive online courses may address the accessibility needs of an increasing number of elearning users.

Smartphone technologies are now used to deploy audio and multimedia guides in cultural spaces, including historic churches. It is important to measure what effect the use of such technologies has on visitor experience of the cultural space and the usability and user experience of the guide. An “in the wild” study was conducted to investigate visitor experience in a historic church, with two versions of a multimedia iPhone Guide and with a traditional paper guide. The Church Experience Scale (CES) and the Multimedia Guide Scale (MMGS) were used to measure the experience of 59 visitors to Holy Trinity Church, Stratford-upon-Avon, known as Shakespeare’s church. A total of 40 visitors used an iPhone guide, 21 a free choice version and 19 a guided tour version, and 19 visitors used a paper guide. Results showed that participants with a smartphone guide had a significantly more positive visitor experience and spent significantly longer on their visit to the church. There was a significant correlation between length of visit and the Enjoyment, Intellectual Stimulation, and Curiosity factor of the CES, but further work is needed to understand the direction of causality in this relationship. The usability and user experience of the multimedia guide conditions did not differ from each other, but the results of the MMGS showed that both guides could be improved in terms of general usability and quality of interaction. Challenges of conducting a study “in the wild” of a smartphone app in a cultural space are discussed.

Software developers are both users of development tools but also designers of new software systems. This dual role makes developers special users of work-related software. To increase the understanding of developers as users and to evaluate the ability of common measurement scales to address developer experience, we conducted a survey measuring developers’ flow state, intrinsic motivation and user experience. Scales used were the Short Dispositional Flow Scale, items from the Intrinsic Motivation Inventory, the Short AttrakDiff-2, and our own DEXI scale. 57 developers from 25 countries responded and results indicate that intrinsic motivation and autotelic experience are significant predictors of developers’ UX whereas hedonic, pragmatic, and general quality are not. In addition, developers’ needs are characterized by efficiency, informativeness, intuitiveness, and flexibility of the tool.

Crowdsourcing has now been used in many areas, including to support people with disabilities. We explored the perceptions of students from two countries with very different cultures (Libya and the UK) of what would motivate them to participate in a crowdsourcing project (DescribeIT) to support their blind and partially sighted peers by describing images in digital learning resources. Students reported that they were interested to participate and particularly motivated by their sense of altruism and wanting to help others. The results also showed that British students reported a mix of intrinsic and extrinsic motivations, whereas for Libyan participants intrinsic motivations dominated over extrinsic. The results of this study will help us design the DescribeIT system to motivate students most effectively and should make developers of international crowdsourcing projects aware that motivations may differ between participants from different cultures.

Storyboards are useful for presenting ideas visually to users helping them understand possible uses of technology allowing them to identify with use situations, especially when no prototypes are available to demonstrate. Storyboards are good for cross-cultural user studies, because they reduce the amount of text users with different native languages have to read. Storyboards are easy to implement in online surveys, which are convenient in gathering data from geographically dispersed groups of users. However, creating localized storyboards requires considering a number of culture related factors. Little research exists in Human-Computer Interaction about how to create localized storyboards for online UX surveys although the need for gathering global user feedback of technology products and services noticeable. We used two focus groups with Chinese participants to inform the design of localization of storyboards for an online survey. Results showed that localization was successful and some design implications were found of localizing storyboards.

In light of changing demographics and an ageing population, research on new technologies to support older people and people with disabilities in independent living is vital. This paper will present the results to date of a review, currently being undertaken, of recent research on new and emerging technologies designed for older people and people with disabilities. The review covers research published between 2005 and 2012 in a range of international peer-reviewed journals and conferences, in the areas of technology, human-computer interaction, disability and assistive devices. On the basis of this review of research, we are exploring what problems of older and disabled people are being addressed by researchers and developers; whether the research is motivated by user needs; the methodologies used and outcomes presented. First results will be presented in the poster.

Numerous guidelines for making websites more accessible for older users have been proposed, but few provide evidence from such users for their recommendations This study investigated effects of line spacing and text justification on younger (24--31 years) and older (65--78 years) adults' performance and preferences in web reading tasks. The three levels of line spacing (single, 1.5, and double) and 2 types of text justification (left only and left-right) were studied. Neither variable had a significant effect on performance measures, although both younger and older adults preferred 1.5 or double spacing over single spacing. There were no significant differences in preferences for left versus left-right justification. These results suggest that contrary to common recommendations, 1.5 or double spacing should be recommended for all users, not only older users and that no recommendation is needed on text justification.

Verbal protocols are the primary tool for understanding users' task-solving behaviors during usability testing. We investigated whether the classic think-aloud and a think-aloud with an explicit instruction leads to different task-solving performance compared to silent working. The results suggest that the classic method had no impact on task performance whereas the explicit instruction led to an increase in within-page and between-page navigation and scrolling activity. The classic method was linked to an increase in mental workload in terms of effort and frustration. The explicit think-aloud led to an increase in mental demand, performance, effort and frustration.

Expert evaluation methods, such as heuristic evaluation, are still popular in spite of numerous criticisms of their effectiveness. This paper investigates the usability problems found in the evaluation of six highly interactive websites by 30 users in a task-based evaluation and 14 experts using three different expert evaluation methods. A grounded theory approach was taken to categorize 935 usability problems from the evaluation. Four major categories emerged: Physical presentation, Content, Information Architecture and Interactivity. Each major category had between 5 and 16 sub-categories. The categories and sub-categories were then analysed for whether they were found by users only, experts only or both users and experts. This allowed us to develop an evidence-based set of 21 heuristics to assist in the development and evaluation of interactive websites.

This paper describes an empirical study of the problems encountered by 32 blind users on the Web. Task-based user evaluations were undertaken on 16 websites, yielding 1383 instances of user problems. The results showed that only 50.4% of the problems encountered by users were covered by Success Criteria in the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.0 (WCAG 2.0). For user problems that were covered by WCAG 2.0, 16.7% of websites implemented techniques recommended in WCAG 2.0 but the techniques did not solve the problems. These results show that few developers are implementing the current version of WCAG, and even when the guidelines are implemented on websites there is little indication that people with disabilities will encounter fewer problems. The paper closes by discussing the implications of this study for future research and practice. In particular, it discusses the need to move away from a problem-based approach towards a design principle approach for web accessibility.

This paper reports findings from a multi-method set of four studies that investigate why we continue to fall for phish. Current security advice suggests poor spelling and grammar in emails can be signs of phish. But a content analysis of a phishing archive indicates that many such emails contain no obvious spelling or grammar mistakes and often use convincing logos and letterheads. An online survey of 224 people finds that although phish are detected approximately 80% of the time, those with logos are significantly harder to detect. A qualitative interview study was undertaken to better understand the strategies used to identify phish. Blind users were selected because it was thought they may be more vulnerable to phishing attacks, however they demonstrated robust strategies for identifying phish based on careful reading of emails. Finally an analysis was undertaken of phish as a literary form. This identifies the main literary device employed as pastiche and draws on critical theory to consider why security based pastiche may be currently very persuasive.

Using recipes in a step-by-step format with multimedia enhancements has been found to increase confidence and enjoyment of cooking but the field lacks research with cooks on the problems they encounter, so it is unclear what granularity of recipe step and associated multimedia would best support them. The current study observed 16 cooks prepare 3 dishes using recipes in 3 different formats to understand what problems cooks have with recipes. Recipe format had a significant effect on the ratings given to the recipe for clarity and ease of use but not on time to complete the recipe. Analysis of cooking activity and cooks' feedback shows that cooks want (i) step-by-step recipes with ingredient quantities in the recipe step, (ii) pictures of the interim states of the recipe, (iii) videos of preparation of unfamiliar ingredients, and (iv) videos of preparation techniques with different types of utensils.

This is a report regarding the experiences of a requirements gathering and management effort for online services in education environments for people with disabilities. It details the challenges that were encountered in managing both the elicited data and the derived requirements from a diverse group of users, as well as the online wiki solution that was used to address them.

This paper presents the design of a new web browser, the Tree Trailblazer, which allows users to browse the web while maintaining a visual record of their exploration path, or trail, through the information space. This design enhances the backtracking aspects of web browsing over current designs by providing visual cues regarding the pages related to the page being viewed, providing users with an understanding of their position in the trail. This design also helps users blaze new trails off a page by allowing them to open previews of pages off of the currently viewed page. The scenario based design process that was used to construct the browser is discussed in conjunction with the initial prototype implementation. A formative user evaluation of this prototype showed this browser design to be very easy to learn and highly usable, with particular attention being paid to aspects of the tree visualization.

Accessibility and usability are well established concepts for user interfaces and websites. Usability is precisely defined, but there are different approaches to accessibility. In addition, different possible relationships could exist between problems encountered by disabled and non-disabled users, yet little empirical data have been gathered on this question. Guidelines for accessibility and usability of websites provide ratings of the importance of problems for users, yet little empirical data have been gathered to validate these ratings. A study investigated the accessibility of two websites with 6 disabled (blind) and 6 non-disabled (sighted) people. Problems encountered by the two groups comprised two intersecting sets, with approximately 15% overlap. For one of the two websites, blind people rated problems significantly more severely than sighted people. There was high agreement between participants as to the severity of problems, and agreement between participants and researchers. However, there was no significant agreement between either participants or researchers and the importance/priority ratings provided by accessibility and usability guidelines. Practical and theoretical implications of these results are discussed.

Finding participants for evaluations with specific demographics can be a problem for usability and user experience specialists. In particular, finding participants with disabilities is especially problematic, yet testing with disabled people is becoming increasingly important. Two case studies are presented that explore using asynchronous remote evaluation techniques with disabled participants. These show that while quantitative data are comparable, the amount and richness of qualitative data are not likely to be comparable. The implications for formative and summative evaluations are discussed and a set of principles for local and remote evaluations with disabled users is presented.

Electronic documents theoretically have great advantages for people with print disabilities, although currently this potential is not being realized. This paper reports research to develop multimedia documents with universal interfaces which can be configured to the needs of people with a variety of print disabilities. The implications of enriching multimedia documents with additional and alternative single media objects is discussed and an implementation using HTML + TIME has been undertaken.

This paper presents the design and evaluation of a hypermedia system for blind users, making use of a nonvisual interface, non-speech sounds, three input devices, and a 37 node hypermedia module. The important components of an effective auditory interface are discussed, together with the design of the auditory interface to hypermedia material. The evaluation, which was conducted over several weeks and used a range of complementary objective and subjective measures to assess users' performance and preferences, is described. The findings from the evaluation with nine visually impaired student participants are presented. The results from this research can be applied to the design and evaluation of other non-visual hypermedia systems, such as auditory World Wide Web (WWW) browsers and digital talking books.