Visually impaired individuals face barriers in online shopping because product details are often conveyed through images, and alternative text is frequently insufficient. The recent advent of Computer-Using Agents (CUA) based on Large Multimodal Models, which can directly manipulate graphical user interfaces, offers new opportunities for such accessibility. However, there is a lack of research that considers how voice-based systems should be designed to support visually impaired users in complex online shopping contexts. Thus, our study qualitatively explores the experiences and needs of visually impaired users as they shop online through voice interaction with a CUA We conducted a Semi-Automatic Wizard-of-Oz study with 12 visually impaired participants, in which they performed shopping tasks with a voice-based CUA system, followed by debriefing interviews. This paper proposes design implications for creating a more inclusive and disability-centered online shopping environment with voice-based CUA for visually impaired users.

Social live-streaming services are video-based platforms that enable real-time interactions between content creators and audiences, monetizing engagement through mechanisms like gift-giving and donations. While prior research has explored user motivations and behaviors through affordance frameworks, it has largely focused on high-level platform features, offering limited design guidance. This study examines how user interface design elements influence communication dynamics in social live-streaming environments and develops practical design principles for user-centric platforms. By adopting a design-oriented perspective of affordances—focusing on perceived actions enabled by the interface—and employing Partial Least Squares Structural Equation Modeling, we analyze how different affordances shape user experiences. Our findings provide actionable insights for designing social live-streaming service interfaces that enhance user engagement while balancing user experience goals with business objectives. This research demonstrates how specific design elements influence communication dynamics, offering valuable guidelines for future platform improvements.

Color design has long benefited from the statistical analysis of public taste and, more recently, from crowdsourcing to discover fresh and popular ideas. However, the current color dictionary is considerably restricted in terms of the scope of expressible design concepts and the control of target demographics. We propose a search-engine-based color palette generator inspired by Natural Language Processing algorithms that filter and cluster semantically related words. The post-evaluation reveals that our results not only faithfully realize the given keywords but are notable indicators of inter-group dynamics; the differential recognition of the other group's identity colors reflects the direction of historic, geographic, or cultural influence.

As the number of functions offered by IT devices and services has grown with technological advances, designers have increasingly incorporated factors such as usage frequency and importance into the design of the user interface (UI). In this process, rarely used functions were pushed to the remote corners of the interface; some of these include infrequent but essential functions (“raressential” functions) that can significantly affect the user experience of a service. Despite their impact on user satisfaction, there have been few studies addressing the issues arising from the use of raressential functions. This study investigates usage patterns of representative raressential functions in order to propose design guidelines for UIs with such functions. Twenty-five participants were asked to sketch and perform the process for locating raressential functions in three different platforms. The protocol analysis and data visualization identified that (1) the corners of the mobile screen are strong visual attractors, (2) the overlap between semantic scopes of icons or names complicates the searching process in the PC environment, and (3) the lack of understanding of application software hierarchy seriously hinders orderly navigation in the TV platform. Participants also exhibited repetitive search patterns unique to each platform that delayed the completion of the task. Additional behavioral characteristics and relevant design guidelines are proposed for enhancing user experience of raressential functions.