Although AI is increasingly assuming autonomous managerial roles within organisations, its leadership effectiveness relative to that of human managers remains lacking. Additionally, AI and humans possess distinct strengths in managerial tasks, suggesting the potential of collaborative human–AI leadership. This study explored the effects of hybrid human–AI leadership on task performance, subjective experience, and neural activation, with the following leadership structures: human only, AI only, human–AI cooperation, and AI supporting human. A total of 80 participants carried out quality inspection tasks led by a human or AI leader under the above structures, with 20 participants randomly assigned to each of the four groups. The results revealed consistent levels of leadership effectiveness between the human-only and AI-only groups, suggesting that AI management could potentially match traditional human management. In addition, the leadership effectiveness was comparable between the human–AI cooperation and AI supporting human groups, indicating the equal viability of these configurations for human–AI collaborative leadership. The human–AI collaborative leadership did not significantly enhance leadership effectiveness compared to the single-leader conditions. The human–AI cooperation group exhibited higher ventrolateral prefrontal cortex activation during AI leader speech, which was likely owing to greater engagement with information processing in the task guidance and performance evaluation.

Digital games and gamified systems have transcended their origins in entertainment to become critical instruments of human computer interaction. Advances in interactive technologies including virtu...

As robots increasingly collaborate with humans in dynamic environments, the tension between communication clarity and social appropriateness presents an important design challenge. While communicative clarity is traditionally assumed to enhance human–robot interaction, recent findings suggest that clear communication can backfire when robots violate social norms. This study introduces and validates a “social amplifier” model of embodied communication, proposing that the value of role clarity depends on the appropriateness of the robot’s social behavior. We developed a novel confidence-aware role adaptation paradigm where an NAO robot dynamically switches between socially appropriate and inappropriate roles based on users’ confidence levels in an ambiguous video discrimination task. Using a within-subjects design with 64 participants, we manipulated role complementarity, choice alignment, and embodied communication across 512 total interactions. Results revealed that embodied communication significantly enhanced role clarity but had conditional effects on collaborative outcomes. Contrary to the “bad is stronger than good” principle, embodied communication asymmetrically amplified positive effects of appropriate robot behavior while having minimal impact on inappropriate behavior. This pattern emerged consistently across subjective measures (collaboration quality, role dynamics, trust) and objective behavioral outcomes (confidence change, choice change). The findings also demonstrate that robots with socially appropriate roles became over 7 times more persuasive when enhanced with rich embodied cues, while inappropriate robots showed no benefit. These results provide evidence-based design principles prioritizing social intelligence over mere expressiveness in collaborative decision-making robots.

With rapid technological advancements, AI has emerged as a potential performer of some leadership functions, supplementing or even substituting certain human leadership. The collaborative leadership dynamics between humans and AI remain underexplored. This study investigated the effects of human consideration (high versus low) and AI structure (high versus low) behaviors on task performance, subjective experiences, and neural activation in a human–AI co-lead scenario. A total of 80 participants engaged in quality inspection tasks that were co-led by human and AI leaders, with 20 participants randomly allocated to each behavior combination. The results revealed that high AI structure was associated with increased job-related satisfaction, employee engagement, and leader trust, while low AI structure slightly facilitated task completion speed (about 6.80%). High human consideration increased the trust in and satisfaction with the human leader. Overall, the combination of high consideration in the human leader and high structure in the AI leader enhanced leadership effectiveness and diversification of work methods (with 30% of participants choosing inspection methods other than AI suggestions). Low-structure AI leader behavior led to increased neural activation during the human-leading process in the prefrontal cortex, which was associated with increased attention, motivation, and semantic processing.

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.

Motivated by the rapid technological advancements achieved in the last five years and the pervasiveness of Artificial Intelligence (AI), this paper investigates the evolving role of HCI and revisits the seven grand challenges outlined in 2019: human-technology symbiosis, human-environment interactions, ethics, privacy and security, well-being, health and eudaimonia, accessibility and universal access, learning and creativity, and social organization and democracy. Through literature analysis, the paper reevaluates the status of each challenge and highlights emerging requirements. Key findings reveal the widespread impact of AI across all domains and emphasize the need for improved AI transparency, alignment with human values, and the development of explainable, personalized, and privacy-preserving technologies to enhance user trust and control. The analysis also highlights the interconnected nature of these challenges and firmly asserts the role of technology in actively supporting human activities and collaborating harmoniously with humans to help them live meaningfully and fulfill aspirations.

Abstract When interacting with voice intelligent assistants (VIAs), users of different age groups usually react differently to the devices’ responses. This research focused on two influencing factors of users’ trust—user age and VIA response forms, and devised an experiment followed up with voluntary semi-structured interviews with 100 younger adult users (aged 22 to 59), 100 older adult users (aged 66 to 79) and 100 child users (aged 6 to11) to (i) quantify the varying degrees of trust across distinct age groups in the different presentation forms used to convey the same response content from VIAs, (ii) identify how the type of question posed influences on the levels of trust exhibited by users of different age groups in VIA response forms and (iii) explore the underlying rationales and motivations behind user perceptions and attitudes towards the diverse presentation forms of VIA responses, accounting for variations across different age demographics. In this paper, seven VIA response forms was studied, i.e. picture, text, hyperlink, ‘picture + text’, ‘picture + hyperlink’, ‘text + hyperlink’, and ‘picture + text + hyperlink’. Results indicate that users from different age groups demonstrate varying degrees of trust in the same responses when presented in different forms, expanding the research on users’ trust from the distinctive perspectives of user ages and response forms, while providing manufacturers with insights into consumer psychology.

Approximately half of the world’s population are bilingual or multilingual. The foreign language effect has been a part of the academic study of people’s decision-making. The Computers are Social Actors (CASA) paradigm posited that people will respond differently when the robot used different social cues. The robot’s language might be an important social cue that makes people have different behavior and experience in the interaction. A limited amount of work has examined the effect of the robot’s language. Thus, this study investigated the effects of the robot’s language (native, foreign) and feedback framework (positive, neutral, negative) on users’ interaction with robots in cognitive tasks. This study further used fNIRS to investigate the effects of these factors on users’ brain activations. The results indicated that: (i) participants had marginally significantly higher performance, and felt significantly higher social presence when the robot used a foreign language; (ii) participants had significantly lower performance when the robot used a neutral feedback framework; (iii) participants had worse experience when the robot used a negative feedback framework; (iv) the use of a foreign language could reduce the effects of the robot’s feedback framework on participants’ performance and brain activations. These findings enrich the research on the foreign language effect, CASA paradigm and the feedback intervention. The findings also have implications for the design and development of robots and conversational agents.

Abstract Voice Intelligent Assistants provide users with new ways of human-computer interaction. With built-in screens, Voice Intelligent Assistants can display images and videos upon users’ requests. Even though images and videos present information in a lively manner, they might also contain overwhelming harmful contents. Due to the lack of effective evaluation mechanisms, it is difficult to prevent the propagation of harmful contents while ensuring the dissemination of compliant visual contents. This research defined a standardized set of classification criteria to identify and classify harmful visual contents. Then, Intelligent Image and Video Rating System, a prototype rating system that implemented the classification criteria was designed and developed. This research further evaluated and verified the reliability and efficiency of the prototype. The prototype system demonstrated additional advantages in swiftly classifying new hazardous contents, and in differentiating the multiple meanings of the same object in different contexts.

As artificial intelligence (AI) became a part of daily life, it has become important to determine user competence in using AI technology. Here, we propose the concept of AI literacy and develop a quantitative scale for obtaining accurate data regarding the AI literacy of ordinary users. We first identified the primary core constructs of AI literacy, including awareness, use, evaluation, and ethics. Next, we generated 65 items to capture these four constructs; only 31 items were retained after a three-step content validation process. Then, we conducted a survey, and collected two samples of data. By reducing the number of items using the first sample and performing reliability and validity tests on the second sample, we obtained a 12-item instrument for the quantitative measurement of AI literacy. The results confirmed that the proposed four-construct model is an adequate representation of AI literacy. Further, AI literacy is significantly related to digital literacy, attitude towards robots, and users’ daily usage of AI. This study will not only aid researchers in understanding how user competence in using AI technology affects human–AI interactions but will also help designers develop AI applications that are aligned with the AI literacy levels of the target users.

This study investigated several visualizations, including enhancing relevant information and impairing distracting information, that harnessed the visual salience effect with augmented reality (AR) to assist people in searching for targets. The experiment used a scenario of shopping for food products where participants searched for the target product wearing an AR head-mounted display that presented the visualizations. In addition, the field-dependent (FD) and field-independent (FI) cognitive styles of users were investigated. First, FI participants completed the product selection tasks more quickly than FD participants when using the visualizations of enhancing relevant information but not the visualizations of impairing distracting information. Second, the visualizations of impairing irrelevant information improved the search speed but not the accuracy of FD participants compared to the visualizations of enhancing relevant information. Third, participants perceived a higher clarity of the highlighted items when they were highlighted with a frame rather than an overlay.

During online cross-cultural communication, knowing more about the person on the other end of the Internet can help improve communication effectiveness. Rapidly developing technology has allowed systems to be built that can collect, analyze, and present individuals’ cultural information, thereby supporting online cross-cultural communication. Compared to national-level cultural information, individual-level cultural information is more diverse, which requires careful consideration of the system’s information presentation design. This research conducted an experiment to study the influence of individual cultural information typicality, user cultural beliefs, and national cultural information on users’ judgments and evaluations. The results confirmed that users have positive attitudes toward individual-level cultural information in online cross-cultural communication. Further, they indicated that designers should pay special attention to situations where the individual-level cultural information is inconsistent with the users’ cultural beliefs. For such systems, providing only individual-level and not national-level cultural information can lead to significantly better user evaluations.

This article reviewed research studies on social media misuse (SMM), including diverse measurements, consequences caused by SMM, and its predictive factors. SMM measuring dimensions typically comprise three categories: motivation-based items, behavior-based items, and impacts-based items. The consequences caused by SMM vary from mood disorders to primary clinic mental diseases (e.g., depression, anxiety). Other life problems such as poor sleep quality and a lower grade point average were summarized. Researchers were also interested in what types of people are likely to have prominent levels of social media addiction, which may be predictive factors for SMM. User profile, including demographic characteristics, personality, and social relationships, has been examined in previous studies. This study aims to give a summary of current SMM studies and emphasize the importance of distinguishing SMM from daily usage.

Abstract The wide usage of voice intelligent assistants (VIAs), such as Siri, brings lots of convenience to our daily life. However, there are also kinds of issues related to VIAs displaying inappropriate contents to restricted users such as children. To address this problem, we developed a system that detects the inappropriate contents and rates them with defined ranks. In this manner, a threshold or suggestion could be given in order to avoid displaying inappropriate contents to restricted users. This evaluation system is called Voice Intelligent Aid Rating System (VIARS). With a developed VIARS prototype, we further tested its effectiveness with a designed experiment that consisted of several tasks. As a result, VIARS’s intelligent rating results were proven to be highly consistent with the experts’ manual rating results, indicating the reliability of the VIARS classification mechanism. It is also notable that when compared with experts’ manual rating, VIARS’s automatic rating mechanism showed significant advantages in response time.

Abstract Internet of things conversational agents (IoT-CAs) are making human–computer interactions ubiquitous. In this study, we experimentally examined the effects of IoT-CA use on face-to-face conversations between close partners. A total of 136 participants (68 close relationship dyads) participated in the experiment. We prepared an IoT chat environment and provided chat topics for each dyad. The dyads were randomly assigned into one of two IoT-CA use pattern groups (joint use: two persons using an IoT-CA together; individual use: one person using an IoT-CA alone) and three interaction conditions (no IoT-CA use, conversation content-relevant IoT-CA use, conversation content-irrelevant IoT-CA use). The results showed that compared with no IoT-CA use, IoT-CA use did not have negative effects on conversation experiences but produced feelings of greater closeness to the IoT-CA in the partners. Furthermore, joint IoT-CA use in the content-relevant condition (IoT-CA made comments relevant to interpersonal interactions) helped increase interpersonal self-disclosure.

Although often ignored, adult gamers, as with children and adolescents, can suffer from problematic gaming. This study explores the use of a built-in gaming gradual intervention system (G-GIS) designed to help adult gamers achieve their desired gaming habits in an autonomous and acceptable manner. In this study, we interviewed 26 heavy adult gamers (i.e., adult gamers who played frequently and for relatively long periods of time) of an online poker game using an in-built G-GIS. Then, we triangulated the interviewees' results with their real-world behavioral data collected over eight months to explore how demographics, attitudes, and contextual factors influenced their use of the G-GIS. The results indicate that family and occupation demographics play key roles in determining adult gamers' gaming habits and their self-control under G-GIS intervention. We also revealed that adult gamers' attitudes and contextual factors can facilitate or hinder the effectiveness of the G-GIS. The findings of this study extend our understanding of heavy adult gamers and reveal how a G-GIS influences adult gamers at the individual level, which can be applied in the design of future game intervention systems, particularly for adult gamers.

This study proposes two adapted think-aloud protocols for the evaluation of a voice intelligent agent. In the adapted retrospective think-aloud (RTA) protocol, users verbalise their thoughts based on the chat history after task-completion. In the adapted interactive think-aloud (ITA) protocol, users verbalise their thoughts regarding the intelligent agent being evaluated without the help of a facilitator. This study compares these two protocols with the classical think-aloud protocol (CTA) for evaluating an intelligent agent in terms of task time and verbal utterances. The influence of the intelligent agent’s emotional expression is also considered. The results suggest RTA is suitable for collecting user experience and causal explanation of utterances, CTA for collecting recommendation and prediction utterances, and ITA for collecting problem formulation and recommendation utterances. Furthermore, CTA and RTA can collect more total utterances, while CTA and ITA are influenced less the VIA’s emotional expression. This study provides guidelines by which future evaluators can choose suitable think-aloud protocols.

This study proposes a classification system that classifies voice intelligent agents (VIAs) into four levels (general, parental guidance, adults-only, and restricted levels) based on both negative dimensions (six content labels and three interaction behaviors) and positive dimensions (three moral intelligence items). An experiment was conducted, and the results validate that the system can predict the classification of the VIA. Furthermore, we also found that different interaction methods have a significant influence on the classification results. The complexity of the interaction significantly lengthens task completion time, and improved evaluator satisfaction leads to different classification results. Therefore, we suggest that evaluators should use text interaction when evaluating the dimension of moral intelligence but should employ the same interaction style as the real scenario when evaluating content labels and interaction behaviors.

Published with license by Taylor & Francis Group, LLC. This article aims to investigate the Grand Challenges which arise in the current and emerging landscape of rapid technological evolution towards more intelligent interactive technologies, coupled with increased and widened societal needs, as well as individual and collective expectations that HCI, as a discipline, is called upon to address. A perspective oriented to humane and social values is adopted, formulating the challenges in terms of the impact of emerging intelligent interactive technologies on human life both at the individual and societal levels. Seven Grand Challenges are identified and presented in this article: Human-Technology Symbiosis; Human-Environment Interactions; Ethics, Privacy and Security; Well-being, Health and Eudaimonia; Accessibility and Universal Access; Learning and Creativity; and Social Organization and Democracy. Although not exhaustive, they summarize the views and research priorities of an international interdisciplinary group of experts, reflecting different scientific perspectives, methodological approaches and application domains. Each identified Grand Challenge is analyzed in terms of: concept and problem definition; main research issues involved and state of the art; and associated emerging requirements. BACKGROUND This article presents the results of the collective effort of a group of 32 experts involved in the community of the Human Computer Interaction International (HCII) Conference series. The group’s collaboration started in early 2018 with the collection of opinions from all group members, each asked to independently list and describe five HCI grand challenges. During a one-day meeting held on the 20th July 2018 in the context of the HCI International 2018 Conference in Las Vegas, USA, the identified topics were debated and challenges were formulated in terms of the impact of emerging intelligent interactive technologies on human life both at the individual and societal levels. Further analysis and consolidation led to a set of seven Grand Challenges presented herein. This activity was organized and supported by the HCII Conference series.

This study examined effects of self-disclosure on relationship closeness with an Internet of Things (IoT) conversational agent (IoT-CA) and attributions of responsibility. Participants and IoT-CAs worked as dyads for two interdependent-outcome tasks: a creativity and a learning task (for measuring dyadic creativity ability and IoT-CAs' understanding of people's preferences, respectively). Dyadic success or failure feedback was determined. Results showed in contrast to self-serving bias (SSB), people did not credit personal responsibility for dyadic success or blame the IoT-CA for dyadic failure. However, when people had previously engaged in self-disclosure with IoT-CAs, they showed reversed SSB, and tended to attribute success to the IoT-CA and accept more personal responsibility for failure. The effect of self-disclosure on attributions of responsibility was mediated by closeness of the relationship. In terms of attributions of responsibility between tasks, people who engaged in self-disclosure with IoT-CAs believed IoT-CAs understood them more and were more likely to attribute success to the learning task. Voice interaction is becoming the mainstream mode of human–computer interaction. Intimate self-disclosure effectively induced closeness between IoT-CAs and individuals. People may tolerate and even accept imperfection in their personal agent. Participants' attribution style may affect their SSB when interacting with computer.

With the development of information and communication technologies, the younger generations as well as more mature generations accept and enjoy playing digital games. The game industry is rapidly g...

By overlaying timeline-synchronized user comments on videos, Danmaku commenting creates a unique co-viewing experience of online videos. This study aims to understand the reasons for watching or not watching Danmaku videos. From a review of the literature and a pilot study, an initial pool of motivations and hindrances to Danmaku video viewing was gathered. Then, a survey involving 248 participants to identify the underlying factor structures of motivations and hindrances was conducted. Their influences on users’ attitude and behaviors with Danmaku videos were also examined. The results showed that people viewed Danmaku videos to obtain information, entertainment, and social connectedness. Introverted young men with high openness to new experience are more likely to view Danmaku videos. Infrequent viewers refused to watch Danmaku videos mainly because of the visual clutter that resulted from Danmaku comments.

Culture has an essential influence on online trust building in close relationships. The objective of this study was to investigate the effect of culture on interpersonal trust and online information-sharing in close relationships. A social dilemma game experiment was conducted by inviting close friend dyads from interdependent (that is, Chinese) or independent cultures (that is, German). Their trust and information-sharing performance in either online text chatting or face-to-face communication were examined. The results showed that in close relationships, Chinese participants had higher interpersonal trust and objective-sharing performance than German participants; Chinese trust and self-evaluated performance were not influenced by communication media; in comparison, German participants’ trust and self-evaluated performance significantly dropped online. The results confirmed that interdependent people are more relation-oriented in building their trust than independent people. Implications for online information-sharing management and the interface design were provided.

Many countries have an increasingly aging population. In recent years, mobile technologies have had a massive impact on social and working lives. As the size of the older user population rises, many people will want to continue professional, social and lifestyle usage of mobiles into 70s and beyond. Mobile technologies can lead to increased community involvement and personal independence. While mobile technologies can provide many opportunities, the aging process can interfere with their use. This workshop brings together researchers who are re-imagining common mobile interfaces so that they are more suited to use by older adults.

After adopting mobile phones, most older adults use them only for calling and SMS. The purpose of this study is to extend their usage of mobile phones to new functions. To understand older adults’ requirements of mobile phones, a questionnaire was constructed and 351 Chinese older adults were recruited to complete the questionnaires. Data collected through the questionnaires were analysed using explorative factor analysis. The results revealed that older adults’ requirements were composed of 10 factors: Find a Specific Function, Awareness and Attractiveness, Readability, Personal Concern, Soft Keys and Multi-tap, Hardware Capacity, Touch Screen, Concern of Learning, Connectivity, and Social Influence. Then, from the above 10 factors, the 6 most important factors were revealed using multiple linear regression analysis. The results imply that accepting new functions is different from accepting a product. Readability and Find a Specific Function, which are critical for older adults’ acceptance of feature phones, are not determinants of their acceptance of new functions in smart phones.

Trust plays an important role in the transaction of e-commerce. This research aimed to investigate (a) the influences of trust on Chinese group-buying websites, (b) the differences of trust between group-buying and business to consumer (B2C) websites, and (c) the applicability of the theory of reasoned action and Gefen’s summarization of trust antecedents for Chinese group buying. The study consisted of (a) a prequestionnaire measuring general trust, (b) an in-lab experiment, and (c) a short open interview. Three major results were found. First, Cognition-Based Trust Antecedent was the most important factor influencing Chinese customers’ trust and purchasing probabilities of both B2C and group-buying websites. Second, participants showed significantly lower general trust on group-buying websites. However, in the same trust situations, participants show significantly higher purchasing probabilities on group-buying websites. Third, the theory of reasoned action and Gefen’s summarization of trust antecedents were not applicable for Chinese group buying.

This study focuses on older adults’ finger-based text entry on smartphones and tablets. Thirty-two older adults entered Chinese characters with two input methods (typing and handwriting) on touch screens with four display sizes (3.5 in., 5 in., 7 in., 9.7 in.). Their performance, acceptance, preference, and errors were recorded and thus four findings were found. First, on small displays (3.5 in. and 5 in.), handwriting contributed to shorter task completion time, higher perceived ease of use, and higher usage intention than typing, but no difference was observed on large displays (7 in. and 9.7 in.). Second, there is a gap of task completion time and perceived ease of use between 5 in. and 7 in. for typing, whereas there is no gap for handwriting. Third, participants’ preference of 9.7 in. was almost the same as that of 7 in., and their preference of 7 in. was 1.5 times as strong as that of 5 in. Fourth, participants’ finger-based text entry was prone to 13 types of errors. Many of these errors were caused by the mismatch between older adults’ mental models and designers’ mental models.

This article presents a comprehensive literature review to investigate whether and why older adults accept handheld computers and how to design elderly-friendly handheld computers. Findings about acceptance, input devices, menu and functions, and output devices are summarized. First, older adults were under social pressure to use mobile phones, but they had low acceptance of advanced functions. Also, they had a different way to judge acceptance factors from younger adults. Second, older adults preferred the physical keyboard to the on-screen keyboard for text entry, whereas they preferred tapping the touch pad to the joystick and buttons for pointing tasks. Third, older adults had shallower mental representation of the mobile phone menus than younger adults. Navigation aids providing contextual information and large cognitive preview per screen could help them. Finally, recommended size and spacing for text and icons are presented.

We are studying how to design a collaborative time management system to facilitate intercultural collaborations considering cultural differences. In this paper, we present the results of a pilot study comparing time management behaviors of Germans, Chinese and Japanese. The results revealed that Germans and Japanese use time management mechanics and goal setting and priorities more frequently than Chinese. Japanese and Chinese have higher preference for organization than Germans. All three groups use more time management mechanics than goal setting and priorities. The implications for time management system design were discussed.

In the global economy, design of digital media often involves teams of individuals from a variety of cultures who must function together. Similarly, products must be designed and marketed taking specific cultural characteristics into account. Much is known about decision processes, culture and cognition, design of products and interfaces for human interaction with machines, and organizational processes, but this knowledge is dispersed across several disciplines and research areas. This article reviews current work in these areas and proposes a research agenda for fostering increased understanding of the ways in which cultural differences influence decision making and action in design and use of digital media.

Mobile entertainment services are rapidly and widely developing. However, in emerging markets like Chinese rural area, entertainment related services are still not fully accepted by mobile phone users. This primary research aimed to study Chinese rural people's acceptance for mobile entertainment, to provide comprehensive models, and to explain the problem from its socio-economic roots. Interview and survey data were collected. Using explorative factor analysis method, two mobile entertainment acceptance models were built: one for rural people in North China and the other in East China. The models show that "social influence" is the most influential factor for north rural users while users' "self efficacy" carries the largest weight in East China. Both factors are more important than "product and service quality". The socio-economic roots of the results were analyzed from the differences between the traditional interdependent society in North China and the more independent society in East China. It primarily reveals the possibility to predict users' technology acceptance with socio-economic variables. Implications for mobile entertainment design were discussed.

In this study, we sought to clarify the effects of users' cultural background and cultural context on human-robot team collaboration by investigating attitudes toward and the extent to which people changed their decisions based on the recommendations of a robot collaborator. We report the results of a 2×2 experiment with nationality (Chinese vs. US) and communication style (implicit vs. explicit) as dimensions. The results confirm expectations that when robots behave in more culturally normative ways, subjects are more likely to heed their recommendations. Specifically, subjects with a Chinese vs. a US cultural background changed their decisions more when collaborating with robots that communicated implicitly vs. explicitly. We also found evidence that Chinese subjects were more negative in their attitude to robots and, as a result, relied less on the robot's advice. These findings suggest that cultural values affect responses to robots in collaborative situations and reinforce the importance of culturally sensitive design in HRI.

Interactivity is considered a prominent characteristic of mobile advertising; however, a properly developed tool to measure the concept has not been developed. This study focusses on the development and validation of an instrument for measuring the interactivity perceived by individuals who interact with mobile advertisements on handheld devices. The confirmatory factor analysis results show that perceived interactivity in mobile advertising is comprised of six correlated but distinct constructs: user control, synchronicity, two-way communication, connectedness, playfulness and interpersonal communication. The result from a series of tests and examinations indicated that the multidimensional scale exhibits content validity and discriminant validity. The internal consistency of the scale reaches an acceptable level. The relationship with personal variables was also analysed. Gender, education, monthly income, years using cell phones, monthly cell phone charges, monthly cost for data services on cell phones and previous experiences with mobile advertisements have no influences on respondent interactivity perception with mobile advertisements. But user age is negatively correlated with perceived interactivity and years using the Internet are positively correlated with perceived interactivity. Young people with more Internet experience are more likely to perceive interactivity of mobile advertisements.

The objective of this study was to investigate people's perception of information security and to unveil the factors that influence people's perception of different threats to information security. In the survey study, 602 respondents were asked to evaluate one of 21 common threats to information security with regard to its rank related to each of the 20 threat-related features. An exploratory factor analysis was then conducted, and a six-factor structure was derived, which includes factors of Knowledge, Impact, Severity, Controllability, Possibility and Awareness. Using this factor structure, the characteristics of the five most dangerous threats (hackers, worms, viruses, Trojan horses and backdoor programs) and the five least dangerous threats (spam, piratical software, operation accidents, users' online behaviour being recorded and deviation in quality of service) were discussed and compared. The relationships between the factors and the perceived overall danger of threats were found and then tested by multiple regression analyses. Significant effects were also found in people's perception of information security related to computer experience and types of loss.

The objectives of this study were (1) to investigate the effects of communication style (CS) and time orientation (TO) on people's perception of and proficiency in responding to notification systems and (2) to study the applications of these effects in the design of user notification in anti-virus software. Significant effects were found in the experiment; the results showed that users with a low-context CS can remember and make sense of the information provided by the notification system better than users with a high-context CS. Polychronic users perceive a lower level of interruption of the notification messages than monochronic users; polychronic users prefer rapid and accurate responses to the stimuli provided by the notification system, whereas monochronic users tend to avoid responding to the stimuli. Four sessions of focus group discussions were then carried out with users of different CS and TO, which focused on the virus attack warning provided by anti-virus software. The results should prove useful to aid designers in creating more effective and appealing ways to give notification or warnings to users.

Handsets are being transformed from the traditional cellular phone to an integrated content delivery platform for communications. Their increasing capabilities and value-added features provide more utilities, and at the same time, make the design more complicated and the devices more difficult to use. The objective of this study was to explore and identify the critical factors that predicate the handset's perceived usability. An online survey was conducted by using a seven-point Likert-scale structured questionnaire tailored to measure the user's perception of the usability level of their current handset. A total of nine usability dimensions were derived from the results of exploratory factor analysis. The total variance explained by these nine factors was 65.20% of the overall variance of the data. Relationships between the nine usability factors and handset design features were described by regression models.

With the advent of Web 2.0, social network services (SNSs), such as Facebook and MySpace, have grown explosively and globally as one of core Web 2.0 applications. However, as revealed in other cultural comparison studies in the field of human–computer interaction, it is believed that cultural differences profoundly impact on how people use SNSs. Unfortunately, the differences in using SNSs have not been systematically investigated, so this study presents a web-based survey study among three nations: Republic of Korea, People's Republic of China, and the United States of America. It was assumed that SNS users form bridging and bonding social capital (borrowed from social capital theory) through the five functions of SNS that were categorized: Identity, Expert Search, Connection, Communication, and Contents Sharing. A correlation between social capital-related activities and usage patterns of SNS was expected. A total of 489 responded to the web-based survey through the three counties. Although the theory of cultural differences turned out to be insufficient to explain diverse usage patterns of SNSs, the results showed that Korean and Chinese users form bridging and bonding social capital mainly through Expert Search and Connection functions, but American users mainly use the Communication function to form bonding Social Capital. Various implications of these results for researchers and practitioners who work on and for SNSs are described as well.

This study investigates the effects of game difficulty on player’s immersion. Key factors in this study are difficulty of direction changes, including three directions (up and down, down and up, and continuously increasing) and difficulty of rate changes, with three rates (slow, medium, and fast). An experiment was conducted with 48 participants, each playing the same experimental games with different difficulty of direction or rate changes. The results indicate that the players have better immersion when the difficulty changes up and down than when it changes down and up or when the difficulty is continuously increased. And the participants have better immersion when the difficulty changes at a medium rate than when it changes slowly or fast.

This study investigates the effects of group orientation and communication style on Chinese subjects' responsiveness to robots. A 2x2 experiment was conducted with group orientation (ingroup vs. outgroup) and communication style (implicit vs. explicit) as dimensions. The results confirm expectations that subjects with a Chinese cultural background are more responsive to robots that use implicit communication styles. We also found some evidence that subjects were more responsive when they thought of the robot as an ingroup member. These findings inform the design of robots for use in China and countries with similar cultural values and reinforce the importance of culturally sensitive design in HRI.

Smart homes are expected to promote productivity and enhance living experience, especially for old adults. To achieve this, the level of user interface intelligence should be designed to meet the needs of users and tasks. The aim of this study was to investigate the impact of user interface intelligence level on user performances for different tasks and different users. Two objectives were pursued. The first was to investigate how the intelligence of the user interface affects user performance when different cognitive tasks are performed. The second was to determine the differences between young and senior users when interacting with smart homes. A two-dimension conceptual model is proposed to describe the impact of these two factors, i.e., user interface intelligence and cognitive tasks, on smart home user performance. A 3-by-3 experiment was designed and three prototypes were developed. Thirty-six young and 36 senior people were recruited as participants. The results showed that different levels of intelligence of user interfaces facilitated user performance with different cognitive tasks. Users completed skill-based tasks using the least time and committing the least errors using the low-intelligence-level interface; when completing rule-based tasks, users exhibited best performance in terms of less error with the high intelligence interface. However, for senior people, because of the decline in cognitive abilities, their performance was not as clearly differentiated as that of younger people when using different smart home interfaces, especially for highly cognitively demanding tasks. Moreover, when senior people completed skill-based tasks, the task load they perceived increased together with the intelligence level of the smart home interface.

There are indications that interactivity could benefit the effectiveness of mobile advertisements. But there are few guidelines on how to design interactive mobile advertisements. This study investigated the influences of various design features of mobile advertisements on perceived interactivity and the relationship between perceived interactivity and attitude toward mobile advertisements. An experiment consisting of 2 sessions was conducted to test 5 proposed hypotheses with 40 participants. Results showed that the number of user control options and the customizability of advertisements have significant influences on users' perception of interactivity. The more options a message advertisement provides, the more interactive the participants perceive the advertisement; a customizable game advertisement is perceived as more interactive than an uncustomizable game advertisement. But no significant effects of presenting instructional information of mobile Web advertisements and including humorous elements were found. Finally, perceived interactivity was found a strong predictor of attitude toward mobile advertisement.

In order to measure player immersion in the computer game narrative, this study explores and analyzes factors of the computer game narrative that influence players who are immersed in the game story world. Originally a questionnaire consisting of six dimensions—Curiosity, Concentration, Challenge, Control, Comprehension, and Empathy—was proposed. To evaluate the questionnaire, two surveys were conducted on the Internet, and data were collected from 734 respondents. After exploratory factor analysis and confirmatory factor analysis, the dimensions were modified to Curiosity, Concentration, Challenge and Skills, Control, Comprehension, Empathy, and Familiarity.

People with different cultural backgrounds think and behave differently. Different cultural characteristics of users of computing systems become significant issues. Studies on cultural differences from various perspectives such as cultural dimensions, presentation, and cognition provide useful information. However, we have not yet succeeded in making computing systems into a very usable environment supporting users with different cultural backgrounds. This paper provides an overview and a comprehensive appraisal of past literatures for cross-cultural effects on computing systems. Cultural dimensions in Hofstede's cultural model and Hall's cultural model are introduced. Then the cross-cultural effects on human-computer interaction are discussed from three perspectives: perceptual, cognitive, and affective, respectively. Finally, cross-cultural challenges in new technologies are discussed in order to throw light onto the future of computing.

Unlike most Web portals in the world, Chinese Web portals are characterized by a huge amount of information, excessive visual stimuli, and very long Web pages. The objective of this study is to investigate the effect of such rich Web portal designs and floating animations on visual search, emphasizing a comparison between Chinese users and German users. Two experiments were conducted to test 2 proposed hypotheses. Experiment 1 studied the effect of Web portal design (rich and simple) on visual search performance (performance time, errors, and satisfaction) with both Chinese and German participants. Experiment 2 studied the effects of static animations (leaderboards, couplets, and large squares) and floating animations (moving down, moving up/down, and random movement) on visual search performance on Web portals. The dependent variables were the performance time, error, satisfaction, and animation recognition. The results indicated that participants using simple Web portals searched faster, made fewer errors, and were more satisfied than participants using rich Web portals. No significant differences were found between the performance time of Chinese participants and German participants. However, satisfaction of Chinese participants was found to be less influenced by the differences between simple and rich Web portal designs, compared with German participants. No significant differences were found in performance time and animation recognition between static animations and floating animations, which indicated that users are able to detect the pattern of animation movements and were able to avoid floating animations as well as static animations. People searching pages with randomly floating animations were found to use significantly more time compared with those searching pages with no animations. Furthermore, users' satisfaction for pages with randomly floating animations, moving down animations, and moving up/down animations was significantly lower than for pages with no animations. Implications for designers and for future research are discussed.

Compared to the Internet, mobile telecommunication has the characteristics of being anywhere, anytime and always online. As the growth of the Internet advertisements market slows down, there is a substantial increase in mobile advertisements. This research investigates the effectiveness of the presentation (static text and graphics, static text and graphics with audio, and animation) of mobile advertisements on the recognition of advertisements. The two types of websites for mobile advertisements – entertainment information and location-based information – are also compared. An experiment was carried out to test the proposed hypotheses. The results show that the effects of static banners with audio mobile advertisement, and animation mobile advertisement were better than static banners in advertisement recognition and memorisation. The participants of websites providing location-based information had higher advertisement attitude and purchase intention than their web-based counterparts providing entertainment information.

This study investigates the child preferences regarding interface layouts in child community web sites. The objective of studying this area is to identify ways of making web sites more usable for children. Two experiments are conducted: interface layout experiment and layout evaluation. In the interface layout experiment, researchers recruited eight fifth-grade students with approximately one-year of Internet experience to arrange interface components and make research interfaces. During the layout evaluation, 16 students with some computer background are divided into two groups and asked to manipulate research interfaces and experimental interfaces, a sample of child community websites on Yahoo. Every movement of the tested students is recorded and the experiment is followed by retrospective interviews with the students. Four criteria of manipulative performance, degree of manipulation, recognition, remembrance and satisfaction, are then shown and discussed. The findings of the layout evaluation indicate that the research interfaces are superior to the experimental interfaces. In addition, this study proposes some interface layout guidelines for child community websites.

This research develops Web annotation tools (WATs), allowing users to annotate on hypertexts, to build up knowledge structure, to browse instructions provided electronically by the system administrator or the instructor, to share annotations with the other learner, and to instruct other learners. The WATs is a distributed World Wide Web application based on HTTP access and allows annotations on HTML documents. The major functions of WATs include highlighting texts, inserting and editing annotations, organizing and presenting annotations hierarchically, as well as sharing annotations. There are two modes for WATs, individual and sharing modes. For the individual mode, the five interactive components are Main Tool Bar, Hypertext, Annotation Editor, Hierarchy Viewer, and Instruction Viewer. The sharing mode supports asynchronous and synchronous sharing of annotations and discussion for peer-to-peer and instructor-to-student collaborative learning.