Generative AI (GenAI) systems offer unprecedented opportunities for transforming professional and personal work, yet present challenges around prompting, evaluating and relying on outputs, and optimizing workflows. We argue that metacognition—the psychological ability to monitor and control one’s thoughts and behavior—offers a valuable lens to understand and design for these usability challenges. Drawing on research in psychology and cognitive science, and recent GenAI user studies, we illustrate how GenAI systems impose metacognitive demands on users, requiring a high degree of metacognitive monitoring and control. We propose these demands could be addressed by integrating metacognitive support strategies into GenAI systems, and by designing GenAI systems to reduce their metacognitive demand by targeting explainability and customizability. Metacognition offers a coherent framework for understanding the usability challenges posed by GenAI, and provides novel research and design directions to advance human-AI interaction.

Hybrid meetings limit inclusion for remote participants. The Hybridge experimental system provides different interfaces for remote and room endpoints, focusing on improving inclusion via shared spatiality and remote agency. In-room participants see remotes on displays around a table, and remotes see video integrated into a digital twin. Remotes can choose where to appear and from where they view the room. We tested Hybridge in a within-subjects study of group survival tasks. An in-person condition was followed by a counterbalanced order of hybrid traditional videoconferencing ("Gallery") and Hybridge. We found that co-presence and agency differences between in-room and remotes were alleviated in Hybridge but remained in Gallery. Physical presence for remotes was higher in Hybridge than Gallery. Conversation flow was better in Hybridge than Gallery, but ease of awareness was not different. We argue that asymmetry should be embraced when designing hybrid meeting systems, with inclusivity achieved by tailoring features for the needs of different endpoints.

With the shift to hybrid meetings in work spaces, there is an increasing need to create a more inclusive hybrid meeting experience where people meeting together in a room interact with those joining remotely. This paper describes a design exploration, implementation, and evaluation of Perspectives, a novel hybrid meeting system that aimed to create an inclusive and equitable space for hybrid meetings. Perspectives digitally composites everyone into a virtual room so that each person has a unique but spatially consistent viewpoint into the meeting. The user study compared Perspectives with three commercially available UX designs for hybrid meetings: Gallery, Together Mode, and Front Row. Results from this study revealed key benefits of Perspectives, including supporting natural interactions, creating a strong sense of co-presence, and reducing cognitive load. Results from the study also helped iterate on the design principles of Perspectives, which offer important insights on supporting hybrid meetings.

The coronavirus pandemic has significantly disrupted information work across the globe. Since March 2020 when the World Health Organization designated Covid-19 as a pandemic, workplaces across the ...

Novel AI-infused educational technologies can give children with blindness the opportunity to explore concepts learned incidentally through vision by using alternative perceptual modalities. However, more effort is needed to support the meaningful use of such technological innovations for evaluations at scale and later wide-spread adoption. This paper presents the development and pilot evaluation of a curriculum to enable educators to support blind learners’ self-exploration of social attention using the PeopleLens technology. We reflect on these learnings to present four design guidelines for creating curricula aimed to enable meaningful use. We then consider how formulations of “success” by our participants can help us think about ways of assessing efficacy in low-incidence disability groups. We conclude by arguing for our community to widen the scope of discourse around assistive technologies from design and engineering to include supporting their meaningful use.

AI technologies are often used to aid people in performing discrete tasks with well-defined goals (e.g., recognising faces in images). Emerging technologies that provide continuous, real-time information enable more open-ended AI experiences. In partnership with a blind child, we explore the challenges and opportunities of designing human-AI interaction for a system intended to support social sensemaking. Adopting a research-through-design perspective, we reflect upon working with the uncertain capabilities of AI systems in the design of this experience. We contribute: (i) a concrete example of an open-ended AI system that enabled a blind child to extend his own capabilities; (ii) an illustration of the delta between imagined and actual use, highlighting how capabilities derive from the human-AI interaction and not the AI system alone; and (iii) a discussion of design choices to craft an ongoing human-AI interaction that addresses the challenge of uncertain outputs of AI systems.

Computer vision systems to help blind users are becoming increasingly common, yet often these systems are not intelligible. Our work investigates the intelligibility of a wearable computer vision system to help blind users locate and identify people in their vicinity. Providing a continuous stream of information, this system allows us to explore intelligibility through interaction and instructions, going beyond studies of intelligibility that focus on explaining a decision a computer vision system might make. In a study with 13 blind users, we explored whether varying instructions (either basic or enhanced) about how the system worked would change blind users' experience of the system. We found offering a more detailed set of instructions did not affect how successful users were using the system nor their perceived workload. We did, however, find evidence of significant differences in what they knew about the system and they employed different, and potentially more effective, use strategies. Our findings have important implications for researchers and designers of computer vision systems for blind users, as well as more general implications for understanding what it means to make interactive computer vision systems intelligible.

We present a body of work undertaken in response to the challenge outlined by Harper et al. in their paper, ?'What is a File?' [9]. Through a conceptual and design-led exploration of new file metaphors, we developed the 'file biography', a digital entity that encompasses the provenance of a file and allows the user to keep track of how it propagates. We explored this through prototyping and utilised it in two user studies. In the studies, we (i) asked people to sketch out file biographies for their own content, and (ii) deployed a tool enabling users to build their own simple file biographies across multiple versions of Word documents. We conclude that new file metaphors may need to play different roles for different types of digital content, with a distinction being drawn between content that is 'in production' and virtual possessions that are, in a sense, a 'finished' artefact.

In the coming years, emergency calling services in North America will begin to incorporate new modalities for reporting emergencies, including video-based calling. The challenge is that we know little of how video calling systems should be designed and what benefits or challenges video calling might bring. We conducted observations and contextual interviews within three emergency response call centres to investigate these points. We focused on the work practices of call takers and dispatchers. Results show that video calls could provide valuable contextual information about a situation and help to overcome call taker challenges with information ambiguity, location, deceit, and communication issues. Yet video calls have the potential to introduce issues around control, information overload, and privacy if systems are not designed well. These results point to the need to think about emergency video calling along a continuum of visual modalities ranging from audio calls accompanied with images or video clips to one-way video streams to two-way video streams where camera control and camera work need to be carefully designed.

Sophisticated ubiquitous sensing systems are being used to measure motor ability in clinical settings. Intended to augment clinical decision-making, the interpretability of the machine-learning measurements underneath becomes critical to their use. We explore how visualization can support the interpretability of machine-learning measures through the case of Assess MS, a system to support the clinical assessment of Multiple Sclerosis. A substantial design challenge is to make visible the algorithm's decision-making process in a way that allows clinicians to integrate the algorithm's result into their own decision process. To this end, we present a series of design iterations that probe the challenges in supporting interpretability in a real-world system. The key contribution of this article is to illustrate that simply making visible the algorithmic decision-making process is not helpful in supporting clinicians in their own decision-making process. It disregards that people and algorithms make decisions in different ways. Instead, we propose that visualisation can provide context to algorithmic decision-making, rendering observable a range of internal workings of the algorithm from data quality issues to the web of relationships generated in the machine-learning process.

Technological support for augmenting the relationship that people establish with remote places has been studied fairly little as the primary focus in telepresence studies is the connection between people. This paper addresses the design challenge for supporting "active place presence" at home. A prototype, Hole in Space, was created to explore the design challenge. A longitudinal study of how an urban couple appropriated the prototype was conducted over the duration of seven months. The paper elaborates on how the Web-mediated design influenced place presence and outlines several aspects that need to be considered when designing for active place presence at home.

In this paper, we present PathSync, a novel, distal and multi-user mid-air gestural technique based on the principle of rhythmic path mimicry; by replicating the movement of a screen-represented pattern with their hand, users can intuitively interact with digital objects quickly, and with a high level of accuracy. We present three studies that each contribute (1) improvements to how correlation is calculated in path-mimicry techniques necessary for touchless interaction, (2) a validation of its efficiency in comparison to existing techniques, and (3) a demonstration of its intuitiveness and multi-user capacity 'in the wild'. Our studies consequently demonstrate PathSync's potential as an immediately legitimate alternative to existing techniques, with key advantages for public display and multi-user applications.

Email is far from dead; in fact the volume of messages exchanged daily, the number of accounts per user, and the number of devices on which email is accessed have been constantly growing. Most previous studies on email have focused on management and retrieval behaviour within a single account and on a single device. In this paper, we examine how people find email in today's ecosystem through an in-depth qualitative diary study with 16 participants. We found that personal and work accounts are managed differently, resulting in diverse retrieval strategies: while work accounts are more structured and thus email is retrieved through folders, personal accounts have fewer folders and users rely primarily on the built-in search option. Moreover, retrieval occurs primarily on laptops and PCs compared to smartphones. We explore the reasons, and uncover barriers and workarounds related to managing multiple accounts and devices. Finally, we consider new design possibilities for email clients to better support how email is used today.

Touchscreens continue to advance including progress towards sensing fingers proximal to the display. We explore this emerging pre-touch modality via a self-capacitance touchscreen that can sense multiple fingers above a mobile device, as well as grip around the screen's edges. This capability opens up many possibilities for mobile interaction. For example, using pre-touch in an anticipatory role affords an "ad-lib interface" that fades in a different UI--appropriate to the context--as the user approaches one-handed with a thumb, two-handed with an index finger, or even with a pinch or two thumbs. Or we can interpret pre-touch in a retroactive manner that leverages the approach trajectory to discern whether the user made contact with a ballistic vs. a finely-targeted motion. Pre-touch also enables hybrid touch + hover gestures, such as selecting an icon with the thumb while bringing a second finger into range to invoke a context menu at a convenient location. Collectively these techniques illustrate how pre-touch sensing offers an intriguing new back-channel for mobile interaction.

The past four years have seen the rise of conversational agents (CAs) in everyday life. Apple, Microsoft, Amazon, Google and Facebook have all embedded proprietary CAs within their software and, increasingly, conversation is becoming a key mode of human-computer interaction. Whilst we have long been familiar with the notion of computers that speak, the investigative concern within HCI has been upon multimodality rather than dialogue alone, and there is no sense of how such interfaces are used in everyday life. This paper reports the findings of interviews with 14 users of CAs in an effort to understand the current interactional factors affecting everyday use. We find user expectations dramatically out of step with the operation of the systems, particularly in terms of known machine intelligence, system capability and goals. Using Norman's 'gulfs of execution and evaluation' [30] we consider the implications of these findings for the design of future systems.

A growing number of domains, including affect recognition and movement analysis, require a single, real number ground truth label capturing some property of a video clip. We term this the provision of continuum labels. Unfortunately, there is often an uncacceptable trade-off between label consistency and the efficiency of the labelling process with current tools. We present a novel interaction technique, setwise comparison, which leverages the intrinsic human capability for consistent relative judgements and the TrueSkill algorithm to solve this problem. We describe SorTable, a system demonstrating this technique. We conducted a real-world study where clinicians labelled videos of patients with multiple sclerosis for the ASSESS MS computer vision system. In assessing the efficiency-consistency trade-off of setwise versus pairwise comparison, we demonstrated that not only is setwise comparison more efficient, but it also elicits more consistent labels. We further consider how our findings relate to the interactive machine learning literature.

New multi-modal annotation tools hold the promise of bringing the benefits of face-to-face contact to remote, asynchronous interactions. One such system, RichReview++, incorporates new techniques to improve access to the embedded multimedia commentary and allows users to annotate with new modalities, like deictic gestures. We conducted a series of field deployments of RichReview++ to characterize how these features benefit students using them for activities in the university classroom. Our first deployment investigated the use of multi-modal annotations as a way for instructors to provide feedback on student term papers. Our second deployment used annotations to support peer discussion about assigned readings in a graduate-level course. We found that presenting voice comments as interactive waveforms seems to facilitate students' consumption of the instructor's voice comments. We also found that gestural annotations clarify voice and give annotators a quick and lightweight way to alter the scope of their voice comments. Based on these results, we suggest ways to best leverage multi-modal annotation tools in education environments.

The use of depth-sensing computer vision to capture bodily movement is increasingly being exploited in healthcare. Yet, there are few descriptions of how real-world practices influence the design of such applications. To this end, we present the development and empirical evaluation of ASSESS MS, a system to support the clinical assessment of Multiple Sclerosis using Kinect. A key issue for developing machine-learning based systems is the need for standardized data on which statistical inferences can be made. We demonstrate that there are many aspects of clinical practice that are at odds with the need to capture standardized data for a computer vision system. We offer three design guidelines so address these: 1) Standardization is a multi-disciplinary issue and needs to be addressed early in the development process; 2) Tools that provide a view into what the camera “sees” can support the achievement of standardized data capture in real environments; 3) Tools to support standardized data capture should maintain the agency of human interaction. More broadly we show that when considering every day contexts, the traditional focus on measurement accuracy is only a small part of the effort needed to make a technology “work” in practice.

This Special Issue on Body Tracking and Healthcare highlights the exciting possibilities that sensor technologies are opening up in health and well-being. From the assessment and monitoring of medi...

The term ‘conceptual designing’ refers to an activity that various practitioners already undertake, but for which we lack a clear definition. This article provides that definition and uses an example of a design concept called ‘Manhattan’ to present how exactly this type of process happens. We define conceptual designing as a constructive framing and re-framing activity, which is mediated by and targeted at the creation of new design concepts. Conceptual designing as an approach is valuable for addressing the fuzziness and ambiguity typical of research that explores novel areas with new partners, methods and resources. It is by no means a new phenomenon, and the main contribution of the article is the clarification of conceptual designing as a particular approach to designing and researching. The approach embraces openness, resource-construction and collaboration. We conclude that conceptual designing can be especially useful in research and design projects that bring different kinds of people, organizations, technologies and domains together into the forming of new well-founded proposals for development. The presentation of conceptual designing in this paper is written with an intention to provide designers and researchers with terminology and concepts that they may use to structure their work as well as to become more resourceful in reflecting upon their projects.

Reference is increasingly made to 'digital collections', yet this term encompasses accumulated digital objects of varying form, purpose and value. We review social science literature on material collections and draw from in-depth interviews with 20 people in the UK in order to offer a clearer understanding of what constitutes a digital collection and what does not. We develop a taxonomy that presents three distinct types of digital collection and demonstrate ways in which the affordances of digital environments may facilitate or impede meaningful practices of acquisition, curation and exhibition in each case. Through doing so, we present a framework for design in support of collecting practices and the development of more meaningful and valued digital collections.

The transition from local and personally owned file-based media management to cloud-based streaming services such as Spotify and Netflix brings new opportunities for users, but also leaves gaps in their understanding and practice. In this paper we present findings from an interview study that explored early adopters' complex relationships with their collections which spanned physical, digital and cloud media. From this we entered a design process focussing on new material forms for cloud based media. Based on this we discuss our design and point to areas where, tangible or not, affordances from physical and digital media are available to be explored in the cloud. Looking in particular at the concepts of scarcity, gifting, and identity we outline possible reasons why, and why not, they could be incorporated into cloud media services.

Computer visions (CV) systems are increasingly finding new roles in domains such as healthcare. These collaborative settings are a new challenge for CV systems, requiring the design of appropriate interaction paradigms. The provision of feedback, particularly of what the CV system can 'see,' is a key aspect, and may not always be possible to present visually. We explore the design space for audio feedback for a scenario of interest, the clinical assessment of Multiple Sclerosis using a CV system. We then present a mixed-methods experimental study aimed at providing some first insights into the challenges and opportunities of designing audio feedback of this kind. Specifically, we compare audio feedback that differentiates which body parts the CV system can see to audio feedback that is undifferentiated. The findings reveal that it is not enough to simply convey that something might be out of view of the camera as what the camera can 'see' depends on the specific configuration of participants and the peculiarities of the skeleton inference algorithms. The results highlight the importance of providing feedback which more naturally conveys spatial information in developing CV systems for collaborative use.

We describe the design, implementation and deployment of Photobox, a domestic technology that prints four or five randomly selected photos from the owner's Flickr collection at random intervals each month. We deployed Photobox in three homes for fourteen months, to explore how the slow pace at which it operates could support experiences of anticipation and re-visitation of the past. Findings reveal changes in attitude toward the device, from frustration to eventual acceptance. Participants drew on the photos to reflect on past life events and reactions indicated a renewed interest for their Flickr collection. Photobox also provoked reflection on technology in and around the home. These findings suggest several opportunities, such as designing for anticipation, better supporting reflection on the past, and, more generally, expanding the slow technology research program within the HCI community.

Planning a wedding is arguably one of the most complicated collaborative tasks people ever undertake. Despite the commonplace use of technologies in "wedding work," little research has looked at this from an HCI perspective. Based on an interview study, we illustrate how technology is used to deliver the sought-after fantasy and a practical, yet entertaining, affair. We identify four ways that technology helps people do this: (a) by allowing much of the practical planning work to become "invisible;" (b) by easing navigation through the delicate rules of family configurations made manifest in the guest list; (c) by helping create a spectacle-like event that adroitly balances excess and realism; and (d) by documenting the wedding in ways that allows re-experiencing the magic after the event. The paper concludes by discussing the implications of this pursuit on social graphs, place, and photography, contributing to the literature on technology and major life events.

This paper introduces a novel document annotation system that aims to enable the kinds of rich communication that usually only occur in face-to-face meetings. Our system, RichReview, lets users create annotations on top of digital documents using three main modalities: freeform inking, voice for narration, and deictic gestures in support of voice. RichReview uses novel visual representations and time-synchronization between modalities to simplify annotation access and navigation. Moreover, RichReview's versatile support for multi-modal annotations enables users to mix and interweave different modalities in threaded conversations. A formative evaluation demonstrates early promise for the system finding support for voice, pointing, and the combination of both to be especially valuable. In addition, initial findings point to the ways in which both content and social context affect modality choice.

In laboratory studies, multi-surface slate-based reading systems have shown great promise as platforms for active reading. However, the true utility of such a system can only be ascertained through the rigors of real world use. We conducted month-long deployments of a multi-slate reading system to support the active reading activities of graduate students in the humanities. During these deployments we documented how the added display area and increased micro-mobility of multiple devices enhanced navigation and reading comfort. We also noted the essential role of writing and annotation. Finally, we observed how electronic affordances like synchronization across devices helped provide functionality that would not have been possible with paper documents. This paper contributes new information about how electronic reading solutions fit into real world reading workflows.

Web-based technologies are often built to capitalize on the flexibility and fluidity that is supported by the internet, with the value of 'access anywhere' underpinning a blurring of boundaries across home and work. Yet the home is well known in HCI to have a unique set of qualities that can use-fully be drawn upon when designing to support domestic life. In this paper we ask what it means to design domestic web-connected technologies, placing the aesthetic and material properties intrinsic to the home and home life at the centre of our design exploration. We present three concepts that were selected and prototyped from a broader process of research-through-design: Tokens of Search provides tangible handles to web resources; Hole in Space connects the home intimately to a remote place; and Manhattan enables the tangible exploration of events in the community, putting the home at the centre. Discussions in the paper consider not only how aesthetics is articulated in the material and digital properties of the artefacts, but also how a consideration of the properties of the home can create a potentially new design space to explore.

We contrast the Chameleon Lens, which uses 3D movement of a mobile device held in the nonpreferred hand to support panning and zooming, with the Pinch-Flick-Drag metaphor of directly manipulating the view using multi-touch gestures. Lens-like approaches have significant potential because they can support navigation-selection, navigation-annotation, and other such compound tasks by off-loading navigation to the nonpreferred hand while the preferred hand annotates, marks a location, or draws a path on the screen. Our experimental results show that the Chameleon Lens is significantly slower than Pinch-Flick-Drag for the navigation subtask in isolation. But our studies also reveal that for navigation between a few known targets the lens performs significantly faster, that differences between the Chameleon Lens and Pinch-Flick-Drag rapidly diminish as users gain experience, and that in the context of a compound navigation-annotation task, the lens performs as well as Pinch-Flick-Drag despite its deficit for the navigation subtask itself.

In recent years the Web has evolved substantially, transforming from a place where we primarily find information to a place where we also leave, share and keep it. This presents a fresh set of challenges for the management of personal information, which include how to underpin greater awareness and more control over digital belongings and other personally meaningful content that is hosted online. In the study reported here, we follow up on research that suggests a sense of ownership and control can be reinforced by federating online content as a virtual, single store; we do this by conducting interviews with 14 individuals about their Web-based content. Participants were asked to give the researchers a tour of online content that is personally meaningful to them; to perform a search for themselves in order to uncover additional content; and to respond to a series of design envisionments. We examine whether there is any value in an integrated personal archive that would automatically update and serve firstly, as a source of information regarding the content within it (e.g. where it is stored, who has the rights to it), and secondly, as a resource for crafting personal artefacts such as scrapbooks, CVs and gifts for others. Our analysis leads us to reject the concept of a single archive. Instead, we present a framework of five different types of online content, each of which has separate implications for personal information management.

research-article On the naturalness of touchless: Putting the "interaction" back into NUI Authors: Kenton O'hara Microsoft Research, Cambridge, UK Microsoft Research, Cambridge, UKView Profile , Richard Harper Microsoft Research, Cambridge, UK Microsoft Research, Cambridge, UKView Profile , Helena Mentis Microsoft Research, Cambridge, UK Microsoft Research, Cambridge, UKView Profile , Abigail Sellen Microsoft Research, Cambridge, UK Microsoft Research, Cambridge, UKView Profile , Alex Taylor Microsoft Research, Cambridge, UK Microsoft Research, Cambridge, UKView Profile Authors Info & Claims ACM Transactions on Computer-Human InteractionVolume 20Issue 1March 2013 Article No.: 5pp 1–25https://doi.org/10.1145/2442106.2442111Published:11 April 2013Publication History 72citation2,167DownloadsMetricsTotal Citations72Total Downloads2,167Last 12 Months94Last 6 weeks9 Get Citation AlertsNew Citation Alert added!This alert has been successfully added and will be sent to:You will be notified whenever a record that you have chosen has been cited.To manage your alert preferences, click on the button below.Manage my AlertsNew Citation Alert!Please log in to your account Save to BinderSave to BinderCreate a New BinderNameCancelCreateExport CitationPublisher SiteGet Access

Systems that detect the unaugmented human body allow players to interact without using a physical controller. But how is interaction altered by the absence of a physical input device? What is the impact on game performance, on a player's expectation of their ability to control the game, and on their game experience? In this study, we investigate these issues in the context of a table tennis video game. The results show that the impact of holding a physical controller, or indeed of the fidelity of that controller, does not appear in simple measures of performance. Rather, the difference between controllers is a function of the responsiveness of the game being controlled, as well as other factors to do with expectations, real world game experience and social context.

As we go about our everyday routines we encounter and interact with numerous physical (e.g. furniture or clothes) and digital objects (e.g. photos or e-mails). Some of these objects may be particular cherished, for example because of memories attached to them. As several studies into cherished objects have shown, we have more difficulties identifying cherished digital objects than physical ones. However, cherishing a small collection of digital objects can be beneficial; e.g. it can encourage active selection of digital objects to keep and discard. This paper presents a study that aimed to increase understanding of cherished physical and digital objects, and beyond that, of how we perceive physical and digital objects, and their advantages and disadvantages. We identified design opportunities for novel products and systems that support the creation of more cherishable digital objects by extrapolating the advantages of the physical to the digital, exploiting the reasons for cherishing digital objects, and aiming for meaningful integrations of physical and digital.

We describe the design and implementation of Photobox, a device intended to be used over many years, which occasionally prints a randomly selected photo from the owner's Flickr collection inside of a wooden chest. We describe and reflect on how engaging in the design of this slow technology [5] led to some unexpected challenges and provoked us to re-think approaches to making technologies that are intended to be used over long time scales and which might act infrequently. We also reflect on how living with the device during the implementation phase led to unexpected insights. We conclude with implications for research and practice in the slow technology design space.

This paper describes a field study of an interactive surface deployed in three family homes. The tabletop technology provides a central place where digital content, such as photos, can be easily archived, managed and viewed. The tabletop affords multi-touch input, allowing digital content to be sorted, triaged and interacted with using one or two-handed interactions. A physics-based simulation adds dynamics to digital content, providing users with rich ways of interacting that borrows from the real-world. The field study is one of the first of a surface computer within a domestic environment. Our goal is to uncover people's inter-actions, appropriations, perceptions and experiences with such technologies, exploring the potential barriers to use. Given these devices provide such a revolutionary shift in interaction, will people be able to engage with them in everyday life in the ways we intend? In answering this question, we hope to deepen our understanding of the design of such systems for home and consumer domains.

Within medical settings there is a growing interest in exploring touchless interaction technologies. The primary motivation here is to avoid contact during interaction with data so as to maintain asepsis. However, there is another important property of touchless interaction that has significant implications for their use within such settings -- namely that interaction behaviour is spatially distal from the device being interacted with. To further understand these implications we present fieldwork observations of work practice in neurosurgery theatres. Drawing on the notion of interaction proxemics and the theory of F-formations, our analysis articulates the spatial organization of collaborative work practices and interaction in these settings. From this understanding of spatial practices, we discuss opportunities and difficulties relating to the design of touchless interaction technologies for in surgical settings.

Material artifacts are passed down as a way of sustaining relationships and family history. However, new issues are emerging as families are increasingly left with the digital remains of their loved ones. We designed three devices to investigate how digital materials might be passed down, lived with and inherited in the future. We conducted in-home interviews with 8 families using the devices to provoke discussion about how technology might support (or complicate) their existing practices. Sessions revealed families desired to treat their archives in ways not fully supported by technology as well as potential tensions that could emerge. Findings are interpreted to detail design considerations for future work in this emerging space.

People are amassing larger and more diverse collections of digital things. The emergence of Cloud computing has enabled people to move their personal files to online places, and create new digital things through online services. However, little is known about how this shift might shape people's orientations toward their digital things. To investigate, we conducted in depth interviews with 13 people comparing and contrasting how they think about their possessions, moving from physical ones, to locally kept digital materials, to the online world. Findings are interpreted to detail design and research opportunities in this emerging space.

This paper presents findings from a field study of 24 individuals who kept diaries of their web use, across device and location, for a period of four days. Our focus was on how the web was used for non-work purposes, with a view to understanding how this is intertwined with everyday life. While our initial aim was to update existing frameworks of 'web activities', such as those described by Sellen et al. [25] and Kellar et al. [14], our data lead us to suggest that the notion of 'web activity' is only partially useful for an analytic understanding of what it is that people do when they go online. Instead, our analysis leads us to present five modes of web use, which can be used to frame and enrich interpretations of 'activity'. These are respite, orienting, opportunistic use, purposeful use and lean-back internet. We then consider two properties of the web that enable it to be tailored to these different modes, persistence and temporality, and close by suggesting ways of drawing upon these qualities in order to inform design.

Artifacts play an important role as triggers for personal memory. They help in the recollection of past experience and in reminiscing about people, places, and times gone by. Of particular interest to us is one type of artifact, the heirloom, which may also have rich connections with memory, but often through the lens of the life of a deceased member of a family, or a friend. Issues of personal memory and heirlooms are complex, diverse, and subtle. In this article we describe a design case study investigating the role technology will play as part of the process of inheritance. We describe the process of translating fieldwork related to artifacts and heirlooms into a design space from which a broad set of themes, concepts and prototypes emerged. We describe the development of this space, its thematic arrangement, and finally a number of resultant artifact designs.

Photographic mementos are important signifiers of our personal memories. Rather than simply passive representations of memories to "preserved" memories, these photos of the past are actively displayed and consumed in the context of everyday behaviour and social practices. Within the context of these settings, these mementos are invoked in particular ways in order to mobilise particular social relations in the present. Taking this perspective, we explore how photo mementos come to be used in the everyday social setting of sharing meal providing a resource that can be mobilised for particular social relations in these settings. Rather than a simple concern with nutritional consumption, the shared meal is a social event and important cultural site in the organisation of family and social life with culturally specific rhythms, norms, rights and responsibilities. We present a system - 4 Photos - that situates photo mementos within the social concerns of these settings. The system collates photo mementos from those attending the meal and displays them at the dining table to be interacted with by all. Through a fieldwork deployment of the system we explore the social work performed by invoking these personal memory resources in the context of real world settings of shared eating. We highlight particular features of the system that enable this social work to be achieved.

Lifelogging is a technically inspired approach that attempts to address the problem of human forgetting by developing systems that ‘record everything’. Uptake of lifelogging systems has generally been disappointing, however. One reason for this lack of uptake is the absence of design principles for developing digital systems to support memory. Synthesising multiple studies, we identify and evaluate 4 new empirically motivated design principles for lifelogging: Selectivity, Embodiment, Synergy and Reminiscence. We first summarise 4 empirical studies that motivate the principles, then describe the evaluation of 4 novel systems built to embody these principles. The design principles were generative, leading to the development of new classes of lifelogging system, as well as providing strategic guidance about how those systems should be built. Evaluations suggest support for Selection and Embodiment principles, but more conceptual and technical work is needed to refine the Synergy and Reminiscence principles.

Despite predictions of the paperless office, most knowledge workers and students still rely heavily on paper in most of their document practices. Research has shown that paper's dominance can be attributed to the fact that it supports a broad range of these users' diverse reading requirements. Our analysis of the literature suggests that a new class of reading device consisting of an interconnected environment of thin and lightweight electronic slates could potentially unify the distinct advantages of e-books, PCs, and tabletop computers to offer an electronic reading solution providing functionality comparable to, or even exceeding, that of paper. This article presents the design and construction of such a system. In it, we explain how data can be mapped to slates, detail interactions for linking the slates, and describe tools that leverage the connectivity between slates. A preliminary study of the system indicates that such a system has the potential of being an electronic alternative to paper.

The growth of image-guided procedures in surgical settings has led to an increased need to interact with digital images under sterile conditions. Traditional touch-based interaction techniques present challenges for managing asepsis in these environments leading to suggestions that new touchless interaction techniques may provide a compelling set of alternatives. In this paper we explore the potential for touchless interaction in image-guided Interventional Radiology (IR) through an ethnographic study. The findings highlight how the distribution of labour and spatial practices of this work are organised with respect to concerns about asepsis and radiation exposure, the physical and cognitive demands of artefact manipulation, patient management, and the construction of "professional vision". We discuss the implications of these key features of the work for touchless interaction technologies within IR and suggest that such issues will be of central importance in considering new input techniques in other medical settings.

With emerging opportunities for using Brain-Computer Interaction (BCI) in gaming applications, there is a need to understand the opportunities and constraints of this interaction paradigm. To complement existing laboratory-based studies, there is also a call for the study of BCI in real world contexts. In this paper we present such a real world study of a simple BCI game called MindFlex®, played as a social activity in the home. In particular, drawing on the philosophical traditions of embodied interaction, we highlight the importance of considering the body in BCI and not simply what is going on in the head. The study shows how people use bodily actions to facilitate control of brain activity but also to make their actions and intentions visible to, and interpretable by, others playing and watching the game. It is the public availability of these bodily actions during BCI that allows action to be socially organised, understood and coordinated with others and through which social relationships can be played out. We discuss the implications of this perspective and findings for BCI.

Online video games can be seen as medium for the formation and maintenance of social relationships. In this paper, we explore what social relationships mean under the context of online First-Person Shooter (FPS) games, how these relationships influence game experience, and how players manage them. We combine qualitative interview and quantitative game log data, and find that despite the gap between the non-persistent game world and potentially persistent social relationships, a diversity of social relationships emerge and they play a central role in the enjoyment of online FPS games. We report the forms, development, and impact of such relationships, and discuss our findings in light of design implications and comparison with other game genres.

As more technologies enter the home, householders are burdened with the task of digital housekeeping-managing and sharing digital resources like bandwidth. In response to this, we created and evaluated a domestic tool for bandwidth management called Home Watcher. Our field trial showed that when resource contention amongst different household members is made visible, people's understanding of bandwidth changes and household politics are revealed. In this paper, we describe the consequences of showing real time resource usage in a home, and how this varies depending on the social make up of the household.

Lifelogging technologies can capture both mundane and important experiences in our daily lives, resulting in a rich record of the places we visit and the things we see. This study moves beyond technology demonstrations, in aiming to better understand how and why different types of Lifelogs aid memory. Previous work has demonstrated that Lifelogs can aid recall, but that they do many other things too. They can help us look back at the past in new ways, or to reconstruct what we did in our lives, even if we don't recall exact details. Here we extend the notion of Lifelogging to include locational information. We augment streams of Lifelog images with geographic data to examine how different types of data (visual or locational) might affect memory. Our results show that visual cues promote detailed memories (akin to recollection). In contrast locational information supports inferential processes -- allowing participants to reconstruct habits in their behaviour.

We present findings from a field study of Wayve, a situated messaging device for the home that incorporates handwriting and photography. Wayve was used by 24 households (some of whom were existing social networks of family and friends) over a three-month period. We consider the various types of playfulness that emerged during the study, both through the sending of Wayve messages and through the local display of photos and notes. The findings are explored in the context of the literature on play, with the aim of identifying aspects of Wayve's design, as well as the context in which it was used, that engendered playfulness. We also highlight the role of play in social relationships, before concluding with design implications.

While it can be a delicate and emotionally-laden topic, new technological trends compel us to confront a range of problems and issues about death and bereavement. This area presents complex challenges and the associated literature is extensive. In this paper we offer a way of slicing through several perspectives in the social sciences to see clearly a set of salient issues related to bereavement. Following this, we present a theoretical lens to provide a way of conceptualizing how the HCI community could begin to approach such issues. We then report field evidence from 11 in-depth interviews conducted with bereaved participants and apply the proposed lens to unpack key emergent problems and tensions. We conclude with a discussion on how the HCI design space might be sensitized to better support the social processes that unfold when bereavement occurs.

We present a field study of TellTable, a new storytelling system designed to support creativity and collaboration amongst children. The application was deployed on a multi-touch interactive table in the library of a primary school, where children could use it to create characters and scenery based on elements of the physical world (captured through photography) as well as through drawing. These could then be used to record a story which could be played back. TellTable allowed children to collaborate in devising stories that mixed the physical and the digital in creative ways and that could include themselves as characters. Additionally, the field deployment illustrated how children took inspiration from one another's stories, how they planned elements of their own tales before using the technology, and how the fact that stories could be accessed in the library led some to become well-known and popular within the school community. The real story here, we argue, needs to take into account all that happens within the wider context of use of this system.

Nowadays it has become increasingly common for family members to be distributed in different time zones. These time differences pose specific challenges for communication within the family and result in different communication practices to cope with them. To gain an understanding of current challenges and practices, we interviewed people who regularly communicate with immediate family members living in other time zones. We report primary findings from the interviews, and identify design opportunities for improving the experience of cross time zone family communication.

The Family Archive device is an interactive multi-touch tabletop technology with integrated capture facility for the archiving of sentimental artefacts and memorabilia. It was developed as a technology probe to help us open up current family archiving practices and to explore family archiving in situ. We detail the deployment and study of three of these devices in family homes and discuss how deploying a new, potentially disruptive, technology can foreground the social relations and organizing systems in domestic life. This in turn facilitates critical reflection on technology design.

Video-mediated communication (VMC) technologies are becoming rapidly adopted by home users. Little research has previously been conducted into why home users would choose to use VMC or their practices surrounding its use. We present the results of an interview and diary-based study of 17 people about their uses of, and attitudes towards, VMC. We highlight the artful ways in which users appropriate VMC to reconcile a desire for closeness with those with whom they communicate, and we explore the rich ways in which VMC supports different expressions of this desire. We conclude with discussions of how next-generation VMC technologies might be designed to take advantage of this understanding of human values in communicative practice.

tutorial Share on Connecting families: new technologies, family communication, and the impact on domestic space Authors: Carman Neustaedter Simon Fraser University, Surrey, BC, Canada Simon Fraser University, Surrey, BC, CanadaView Profile , Tejinder K. Judge Virginia Tech, Blacksburg, VA, USA Virginia Tech, Blacksburg, VA, USAView Profile , Steve Harrison Virginia Tech, Blacksburg, VA, USA Virginia Tech, Blacksburg, VA, USAView Profile , Abigail Sellen Microsoft Research Cambridge, Cambridge, United Kingdom Microsoft Research Cambridge, Cambridge, United KingdomView Profile , Xiang Cao Microsoft Research Cambridge, Cambridge, United Kingdom Microsoft Research Cambridge, Cambridge, United KingdomView Profile , David Kirk University of Nottingham University of NottinghamView Profile , Joseph Kaye Nokia Research Nokia ResearchView Profile Authors Info & Claims GROUP '10: Proceedings of the 16th ACM international conference on Supporting group workNovember 2010 Pages 363–366https://doi.org/10.1145/1880071.1880152Online:07 November 2010Publication History 8citation633DownloadsMetricsTotal Citations8Total Downloads633Last 12 Months38Last 6 weeks3 Get Citation AlertsNew Citation Alert added!This alert has been successfully added and will be sent to:You will be notified whenever a record that you have chosen has been cited.To manage your alert preferences, click on the button below.Manage my AlertsNew Citation Alert!Please log in to your account Save to BinderSave to BinderCreate a New BinderNameCancelCreateExport CitationPublisher SiteGet Access

Creating digital archives of personal and family artifacts is an area of growing interest, but which seemingly is often not supported by a thorough understanding of current home archiving practice. In this article we seek to excavate the home archive, exploring those things that people choose to keep rather than simply accumulate. Based on extensive field research in family homes we present an investigation of the kinds of sentimental objects, both physical and digital, to be found in homes, and through in-depth interviews with family members we explore the values behind archiving practices, explaining why and how sentimental artefacts are kept. In doing this we wish to highlight the polysemous nature of things and to argue that archiving practice in the home is not solely concerned with the invocation of memory. In support of this we show how sentimental artifacts are also used to connect with others, to define the self and the family, to fulfill obligations and, quite conversely to efforts of remembering, to safely forget. Such values are fundamental to family life where archiving takes place and consequently we explore how home archiving is achieved as a familial practice in the negotiated spaces of the home. From this grounded understanding of existing practices and values, in context, we derive requirements and implications for the design of future forms of domestic archiving technology.

Shake2Talk is a mobile messaging system that allows users to send sounds and tactile sensations to one another via their mobile phones. Messages are created through gestures and then sent to the receiver's phone where they play upon arrival. This paper reports a study of the Shake2Talk system in use by six couples, and begins to uncover the types of messaging practices that occur, and the values and meanings that users ascribe to these messages.

This paper offers an exploration of the attitudes of older adults to keeping in touch with people who are important to them. We present findings from three focus groups with people from 55 to 81 years of age. Themes emerging from the findings suggest that older adults view the act of keeping in touch as being worthy of time and dedication, but also as being something that needs to be carefully managed within the context of daily life. Communication is seen as a means through which skill should be demonstrated and personality expressed, and is understood in a very different context to the lightweight interaction that is increasingly afforded by new technologies. The themes that emerged are used to elicit a number of design implications and to promote some illustrative design concepts for new communication devices.

This paper describes the rationale and design process for Shoebox, a "digital box" that combines the storage and display of digital images in the home in one unit. By combining these two functions in one, Shoebox attempts to bridge the divide between the location within a home where digital content is typically stored, and the means by which it can be put on display, as well as provide a form factor that encourages co-located sharing of images.

In this paper, we describe "The Other Brother", a semi-autonomous device that captures images and video of spontaneous moments in the course of everyday life. It was our goal to design a situated, tangible object for life-time capturing purposes. In addition to describing the object and our deployment findings, this paper also discusses the design process and the goals we were aiming to achieve through the design. This was an iterative process from initial sketches, concepts and physical explorations towards a final design and several prototypes. The final prototype acts as an agent that behaves to some extent autonomously, capturing spontaneous moments that enable people to re-experience these moments in a playful way. Testing The Other Brother in a domestic environment, we describe several findings of the impact of the object in the home, reflect on several design and interaction issues, and discuss future directions for continuation of this research.

This paper presents a new study of the role, importance and meaning of sound in the home. Drawing on interview data and sound recordings gathered from seven households, this study offers fresh insight into the ways in which the domestic soundscape is managed and understood. The data revealed that household members engaged in a wide variety of sound management practices to monitor and control the real-time flow of sonic information throughout the home. They also showed that families were sometimes surprised and delighted by the ability to record fragments of the soundscape for later use. These findings suggest a number of roles for technology in enhancing the domestic soundscape and its associated behaviors, which we present here in the form of example sonic interventions created in a design workshop at the end of the project.

In this paper we elucidate the patterns of behavior of home movie makers through a study of 12 families and a separate focus group of 7 teenagers. Analogous to a similar study of photowork [13], the goal is to provide a deeper understanding of what people currently do with video technologies, balancing the preponderence of techno-centric work in the area with appropriate user-centric insight. From our analysis, we derive a videowork lifecycle to frame the practices users engage in when working with video technologies in the home, and uncover two broad types of video usage therein. This has implications for how we conceive of and devise tools to support these practices, as we discuss.

We report on the results of a study using SenseCam, a "life-logging" technology in the form of a wearable camera, which aims to capture data about everyday life in order to support people's memory for past, personal events. We find evidence that SenseCam images do facilitate people's ability to connect to their past, but that images do this in different ways. We make a distinction between "remembering" the past, and "knowing" about it, and provide evidence that SenseCam images work differently over time in these capacities. We also compare the efficacy of user-captured images with automatically captured images and discuss the implications of these findings and others for how we conceive of and make claims about life-logging technologies.

This work presents the results of a comparative study in which we investigate the ways manipulation of physical versus digital media are fundamentally different from one another. Participants carried out both a puzzle task and a photo sorting task in two different modes: in a physical 3-dimensional space and on a multi-touch, interactive tabletop in which the digital items resembled their physical counterparts in terms of appearance and behavior. By observing the interaction behaviors of 12 participants, we explore the main differences and discuss what this means for designing interactive surfaces which use aspects of the physical world as a design resource.

We present a system for the peripheral display of digital handwritten notes, motivated by the joint observation that people seldom refer back to their notes and that these notes often contain useful information. We describe the user-led design of the system, incorporating interviews, paper prototypes, and interactive prototypes. A preliminary field trial of the system indicates that users derive value from the system both for low-distraction reminding and for serendipitous idea generation. These promising initial results suggest significant scope for future work.

In this paper we introduce the notion of "photowork" as the activities people perform with their digital photos after cap-ture but prior to end use such as sharing. Surprisingly, these processes of reviewing, downloading, organizing, editing, sorting and filing have received little attention in the litera-ture yet they form the context for a large amount of the 'search' and 'browse' activities so commonly referred to in studies of digital photo software. Through a deeper under-standing of photowork using field observation and inter-views, we seek to highlight its significance as an interaction practice. At the same time, we discover how "search" as it is usually defined may have much less relevance than new ways of browsing for the design of new digital photo tools, in particular, browsing in support of the photowork activi-ties we describe.

We present a study comparing usability testing of a single interface versus three functionally equivalent but stylistically distinct designs. We found that when presented with a single design, users give significantly higher ratings and were more reluctant to criticize than when presented with the same design in a group of three. Our results imply that by presenting users with alternative design solutions, subjective ratings are less prone to inflation and give rise to more and stronger criticisms when appropriate. Contrary to our expectations, our results also suggest that usability testing by itself, even when multiple designs are presented, is not an effective vehicle for soliciting constructive suggestions about how to improve the design from end users. It is a means to identify problems, not provide solutions.

In this paper we describe a field trial designed to investigate the potential of remote, situated messaging within the home. Five households used our "HomeNote" device for approximately a month. The results show a diversity of types of communication which highlight the role of messaging both to a household and to a place. It also shows the ways in which these kinds of messages enable subtle ways of requesting action, expressing affection, and marking identity in a household -- communication types which have received little attention in the research literature. These in turn point to new concepts for technology which we describe.

We report on a diary study of how and why knowledge workers use the World Wide Web. By examining in detail a complete two-day set of Web activities from each of 24 people, we construct a framework with which to describe the different tasks knowledge workers undertake. By looking at the characteristics of each type of activity, we can see how certain activities are unsuited to particular kinds of technologies (e.g., mobile devices); how Web tools might be incrementally improved; and how we might better support knowledge workers' Web tasks in the future

New computer applications, such as the infamous “Napster” system enable the sharing of music over the Internet, with limited communication around this sharing activity. This paper discusses the use and opportunities for these music sharing technologies using interviews with users of both conventional and new music sharing technologies. The data show that music sharing is a practice that is richly linked with other social activities. New music is often discovered through friends, by listening to music together, or in the form of compilation tapes. In these environments, sharing music is a natural activity. With music sharing over the Internet, however, much of this social context is removed. This suggests opportunities to turn music sharing into a more collaborative and community-related activity. These opportunities are explored with the “Music Buddy”, a system for browsing others’ music collections without infringing the copyright of artists. These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.

The rapid and accelerating move towards use of mobile technologies has increasingly provided people and organizations with the ability to work away from the office and on the move. The new ways of working afforded by these technologies are often characterized in terms of access to information and people anytime, anywhere. This article presents a study of mobile workers that highlights different facets ofaccessto remote people and information, and different facets ofanytime, anywhere. Four key factors in mobile work are identified: the role of planning, working in "dead time," accessing remote technological and informational resources, and monitoring the activities of remote colleagues. By reflecting on these issues, we can better understand the role of technology and artifacts in mobile work and identify the opportunities for the development of appropriate technological solutions to support mobile workers.

Despite the increasing number of new devices entering the market allowing the capture or recording of information (whether it be marks on paper, scene, sound or moving images), there has been little study of when and why people want to do these kinds of activities. In an effort to systematically explore design requirements for new kinds of information capture devices, we devised a diary study of 22 individuals in a range of different jobs. The data were used to construct a taxonomy as a framework for design and analysis. Design implications are drawn from the framework and applied to the design of digital cameras and hand held scanners.

This paper reports on a laboratory experiment aimed at exploring the importance of person versus task space in supporting work at a distance through Multimedia Desktop Systems (MDSs). Person space refers to the ability to see and hear remote colleagues while task space refers to the ability to share work-related artifacts. A 2×2×4 mixed factorial experimental design was used (n=72) in which video quality (broad band vs narrow band) was varied for the display of remote colleagues, group size (point-to-point vs point-to-multipoint), and task. Surprisingly, subjects not only rated the poor quality video conditions more highly than good quality video conditions, but they also completed their tasks faster. These findings are explained in terms of a distraction effect imposed by the display of remote colleagues. This has practical implications for the design of MDSs.

Article A diary study of work-related reading: design implications for digital reading devices Share on Authors: Annette Adler Xerox Palo Alto Research Center, 3333 Coyote Hill Rd., Palo Alto, CA Xerox Palo Alto Research Center, 3333 Coyote Hill Rd., Palo Alto, CAView Profile , Anuj Gujar Xerox Palo Alto Research Center, 3333 Coyote Hill Rd., Palo Alto, CA Xerox Palo Alto Research Center, 3333 Coyote Hill Rd., Palo Alto, CAView Profile , Beverly L. Harrison Xerox Palo Alto Research Center, 3333 Coyote Hill Rd., Palo Alto, CA Xerox Palo Alto Research Center, 3333 Coyote Hill Rd., Palo Alto, CAView Profile , Kenton O'Hara Xerox Research Centre Europe, (formerly Rank Xerox Research Centre) 61 Regent St., Cambridge, CB2 1AB, UK Xerox Research Centre Europe, (formerly Rank Xerox Research Centre) 61 Regent St., Cambridge, CB2 1AB, UKView Profile , Abigail Sellen Xerox Research Centre Europe, (formerly Rank Xerox Research Centre) 61 Regent St., Cambridge, CB2 1AB, UK Xerox Research Centre Europe, (formerly Rank Xerox Research Centre) 61 Regent St., Cambridge, CB2 1AB, UKView Profile Authors Info & Claims CHI '98: Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing SystemsJanuary 1998 Pages 241–248https://doi.org/10.1145/274644.274679Published:01 January 1998 147citation2,498DownloadsMetricsTotal Citations147Total Downloads2,498Last 12 Months123Last 6 weeks12 Get Citation AlertsNew Citation Alert added!This alert has been successfully added and will be sent to:You will be notified whenever a record that you have chosen has been cited.To manage your alert preferences, click on the button below.Manage my AlertsNew Citation Alert!Please log in to your account Save to BinderSave to BinderCreate a New BinderNameCancelCreateExport CitationPublisher SiteGet Access

We report on a study of graduate students conducting research in libraries, focusing on how they extract and record information as they read. By examining their information recording activities within the context of their work as a whole, it is possible to highlight why students choose particular strategies and styles of recording for what these activities provide both at the time of reading and at subsequent points in time. The implications of these findings for digital library technologies are discussed.

We report on a laboratory study that compares reading from paper to reading on-line.Critical differences have to do with the major advantages paper offers in supporting annotation while reading, quick navigation, and flexibility of spatial layout.These, in turn, allow readers to deepen their understanding of the text, extract a sense of its structure, create a plan for writing, cross-refer to other documents, and interleave reading and writing.We discuss the design implications of these findings for the development of better reading technologies.

We report on an examination of work practice in a knowledge-based, document-intensive organisation and describe the role of paper in that work.We show how such an examination can provide a resource for (1 ) the dclcrnlinalion 01 sys(cm design modifications that can bc undcr[akcn in the short term; (2) (hc (tctermination of entirely new systems design requiring longer term research and development; and (3) helping to specify where paper will ctmlinuc 10 Ix! uwd in Iu(urc cloCUlllCl}l-rCl iltC[l work praclicc.

We show how an ethnographic examination of the International Monetary Fund in Washington, D.C. has implications for the design of tools to support collaborative work.First, it reports how information that requires a high degree of professional judgement in its production is unsuited for most current groupware tools.This is contrasted with the shareability of information which can 'stand-alone'.Second, it reports how effective re-use of documents will necessarily involve paper, or 'paper-like' equivalents.Both issues emphasise the need to take into account social processes in the sharing of certain kinds of information.

Three different videoconferencing systems for supporting multiparty, remote conversations are described and evaluated experimentally. The three systems differed by how many participants were visible at once, their spatial arrangement, and control over who was seen. Conversations using these systems were compared to same-room (Experiment 1) and audio-only (Experiment 2) conversations. Specialized speech-tracking equipment recorded the on-off patterns of speech that allowed objective measurement of structural aspects of the conversations, such as turn length, pauses, and interruptions. Questionnaires and interviews also documented participants' opinions and perceptions in the various settings. Contrary to expectation, systems in which visual cues such as selective gaze were absent produced no differences in turn-taking or in any other aspect of the structure of conversation. In fact, turn-taking was unaffected even when visual information was completely absent. Overall, only the same-room condition showed any significant differences from any other condition; people in the same room produced more interruptions and fewer formal handovers of the floor than in any of the technology-mediated conditions. In this respect, the audio-only and video systems examined in these studies were equivalent. However, analyses of participants' perceptions showed that participants felt that visual access in mediated conversations was both important and beneficial in conversation. Further, there were indications that the particular design of the different video systems did affect some aspects of conversational behavior, such as the ability to hold side and parallel conversations.

Article Two-handed input in a compound task Share on Authors: Paul Kabbash Computer Systems Research Institute, University of Toronto, Toronto, Ont., M5S 1A4, Canada Computer Systems Research Institute, University of Toronto, Toronto, Ont., M5S 1A4, CanadaView Profile , William Buxton Computer Systems Research Institute, University of Toronto, Toronto, Ont., M5S 1A4, Canada and Xerox Palo Alto Research Center, 3333 Coyote Hill Rd., Palo Alto, CA Computer Systems Research Institute, University of Toronto, Toronto, Ont., M5S 1A4, Canada and Xerox Palo Alto Research Center, 3333 Coyote Hill Rd., Palo Alto, CAView Profile , Abigail Sellen Rank Xerox EuroPARC, 61 Regent St., Cambridge, CB2 1AB, U.K and MRC Applied Psychology Unit, 15 Chaucer Rd., Cambridge, CB2 2EF, U.K. Rank Xerox EuroPARC, 61 Regent St., Cambridge, CB2 1AB, U.K and MRC Applied Psychology Unit, 15 Chaucer Rd., Cambridge, CB2 2EF, U.K.View Profile Authors Info & Claims CHI '94: Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing SystemsApril 1994 Pages 417–423https://doi.org/10.1145/191666.191808Online:24 April 1994Publication History 106citation1,523DownloadsMetricsTotal Citations106Total Downloads1,523Last 12 Months42Last 6 weeks3 Get Citation AlertsNew Citation Alert added!This alert has been successfully added and will be sent to:You will be notified whenever a record that you have chosen has been cited.To manage your alert preferences, click on the button below.Manage my AlertsNew Citation Alert!Please log in to your account Save to BinderSave to BinderCreate a New BinderNameCancelCreateExport CitationPublisher SiteGet Access

We describe marking menus, an extension of pie menus, which are well suited for stylus-based interfaces. Pie menus are circular menus subdivided into sectors, each of which might correspond to a different command. One moves the cursor from the center of the pie into the desired sector. Marking menus are invisible pie menus in which the movement of the cursor during a selection leaves an "ink trail" similar to a pen stroke on paper. The combination of a pie menu and a marking menu supports an efficient transition from novice to expert performance. Novices can "pop-up" a pie menu and make a selection, whereas experts can simply make the corresponding mark without waiting for the menu to appear. This article describes an experiment in which we explored both articulatory and cognitive aspects of marking menus for different numbers of items per menu and using different input devices (mouse, trackball, and stylus). The articulatory aspects are how well subjects could execute the physical actions necessary to select from pie marking menus. Articulatory aspects were investigated by presenting one group of subjects with the task of selecting from fully visible menus. Because one feature of marking menus is that users should be able to select from them without seeing the menus (by making a mark), we also ran two groups of subjects with invisible pie menus: one group with an ink trail and one without. These subjects were therefore faced with the task of either mentally representing the menu or associating marks with the commands they invoked through practice. These then are the cognitive aspects to which we refer. Our results indicate that subjects' performance degraded as the number of items increased. When menus were hidden, however, subjects performance did not degrade as rapidly when menus contained even numbers of items. We also found subjects performed better with the mouse and stylus than with the trackball.

This paper reports on the first of a series of analyses aimed at comparing same room and video-mediated conversations for multiparty meetings. This study compared patterns of spontaneous speech for same room versus two videomediated conversations. One video system used a single camera, monitor and speaker, and a picture-in-a-picture device to display multiple people on one screen. The other system used multiple cameras, monitors, and speakers in order to support directional gaze cues and selective listening. Differences were found between same room and video-mediated conversations in terms of floor control and amount of simultaneous speech. While no differences were found between the video systems in terms of objective speech measures, other important differences are suggested and discussed.

No abstract available.

The use of different kinds of feedback in preventing mode errors was investigated. Two experiments examined the frequency of mode errors in a text-editing task where a mode error was defined as an attempt to issue navigation commands while in insert mode, or an attempt to insert text while in command mode. In Experiment 1, the effectiveness of kinesthetic versus visual feedback was compared in four different conditions: the use of keyboard versus foot pedal for changing mode (kinesthetic feedback), crossed with the presence or absence of visual feedback to indicate mode. The results showed both kinesthetic and visual feedback to be effective in reducing mode errors. However, kinesthetic was more effective than visual feedback both in terms of reducing errors and in terms of reducing the cognitive load associated with mode changes. Experiment 2 tested the hypothesis that the superiority of this kinesthetic feedback was due to the fact that the foot pedal required subjects actively to maintain insert mode. The results confirmed that the use of a nonlatching foot pedal for switching modes provided a more salient source of information on mode state than the use of a latching pedal. On the basis of these results, we argue that user-maintained mode states prevent mode errors more effectively than system-maintained mode states.

An experiment is described comparing three devices (a mouse, a trackball, and a stylus with tablet) in the performance of pointing and dragging tasks.During pointing, movement times were shorter and error rates were lower than during dragging.It is shown that Fitts' law can model both tasks, and that within devices the index of performance is higher when pointing than when dragging.Device differences also appeared.The stylus displayed a higher rate of information pmeessing than the mouse during pointing but not during dragging.The trackball ranked third for both tasks,

A media space is a system that uses integrated video, audio, and computers to aHow individuals and groups to work together despite being distributed spatially and temporally. Our media space, CAVECAT (Computer Audio Video Enhanced Collaboration And Telepresence), enables a small number of individuals or groups located in separate offices to engage in collaborative work without leaving their offices. This paper presents and summarizes our experiences during initial use of CAVECAT, including unsolved technological obstacles we have encountered, and the psychological and social impact of the technology. Where possible we discuss relevant findings from the psychological literature, and implications for design of the next-generation media space.

This paper describes and evaluates the design of four virtual controllers for use in rotating three-dimensional objects using the mouse. Three of four of these controllers are "new" in that they extend traditional direct manipulation techniques to a 3-D environment. User performance is compared during simple and complex rotation tasks. The results indicate faster performance for complex rotations using the new continuous axes controllers compared to more traditional slider approaches. No significant differences in accuracy for complex rotations were found across the virtual controllers.A second study compared the best of these four virtual controllers (the Virtual Sphere) to a control device by Evans, Tanner and Wein. No significant differences either in time to complete rotation task or accuracy of performance were found. All but one subject indicated they preferred the Virtual Sphere because it seemed more "natural".