A growing body of evidence suggests Voice Assistants (VAs) are highly valued by people with vision impairments (PWVI) and much less so by sighted users. Yet, many are deployed in homes where both PWVI and sighted family members reside. Researchers have yet to study whether VA use and perceived benefits are affected in settings where one person has a visual impairment and others do not. We conducted six in-depth interviews with partners to understand patterns of domestic VA use in mixed-visual-ability families. Although PWVI were more motivated to acquire VAs, used them more frequently, and learned more proactively about their features, partners with vision identified similar benefits and disadvantages of having VAs in their home. We found that the universal usability of VAs both equalizes experience across abilities and presents complex tradeoffs for families-regarding interpersonal relationships, domestic labor, and physical safety-which are weighed against accessibility benefits for PWVI and complicate the decision to fully integrate VAs in the home.

Distance separated grandparents and grandchildren often face challenges in staying connected. To explore this topic, we designed G2G, a shared calendar and video messaging system to connect young children (ages 5-10) with their grandparents over distance. Our design focused on providing grandparents and grandchildren with an awareness of each other's lives to support conversations and design elements to help reduce the need for parent scaffolding. A field study with two grandparent-grandchild pairs over two months showed that systems designed around structured communication can help young children develop a routine around staying in touch with their remote grandparents. Autonomy in maintaining awareness can help children to be engaged more easily. This suggests that designs focusing on connecting young children to their grandparents over distance should be flexible yet structured and designing to reduce parental scaffolding can lead to positive effects and strengthened relationships.

In the design of technology for children, many products hope to encourage ideal behavior. Goals or desired outcomes for children-oriented products, such as learning, exploration or self-expression, are often set by adults (e.g. parents, guardians, teachers). These adult goals are often considered alongside the goals and interests of children, but what happens when these are conflicting? It is common for technology creators to have to make choices that support or prioritize one set of goals over the other.

Video chat systems such as Skype, Google+ Hangouts, and FaceTime have been widely adopted by family members and friends to connect with one another over distance. We have conducted a corpus of studies that explore how various demographics make use of such video chat systems in which this usage moves beyond the paradigm of conversational support to one in which aspects of everyday life are shared over long periods of time, sometimes in an almost passive manner. We describe and reflect on studies of long-distance couples, teenagers, and major life events, along with design research focused on new video communication systems—the Family Window, Family Portals, and Perch—that explicitly support “always-on video” for awareness and communication. Overall, our findings show that people highly value long-term video connections and have appropriated them in a number of different ways. Designers of future video communication systems need to consider: ways of supporting the sharing of everyday life rather than just conversation, providing different design solutions for different locations and situations, providing appropriate audio control and feedback, and supporting expressions of intimacy over distance.

Much ICTD research for sub-Saharan Africa has focused on how technology related interventions have aimed to incorporate marginalized communities towards global economic growth. Our work builds on this. We present results from an exploratory qualitative study on the family communication practices of family members who communicate both within and between rural, suburban, and urban settings in Kenya. Our findings reveal that family communication focuses on economic support, well-being, life advice, and everyday coordination of activities. We also outline social factors that affect family communication, including being an eldest child, having a widowed sibling, and having reduced access to technology because of gender, literacy, or one's financial situation. Lastly, we discuss new opportunities for technology design and articulate the challenges that designers will face if creating or deploying family communication technologies in Kenya.

Our research explores the use of mobile video chat in public spaces by people participating in parallel experiences, where both a local and remote person are doing the same activity together at the same time. We prototyped a wearable video chat experience and had pairs of friends and family members participate in 'shared geocaching' over distance. Our results show that video streaming works best for navigation tasks but is more challenging to use for fine-grained searching tasks. Video streaming also creates a very intimate experience with a remote partner, but this can lead to distraction from the 'real world' and even safety concerns. Overall, privacy concerns with streaming from a public space were not typically an issue; however, people tended to rely on assumptions of what were acceptable. The implications are that designers should consider appropriate feedback, user disembodiment, and asymmetry when designing for parallel experiences.

Collaboration personas are a tool that can be used to design for groups. Prior work posits that collaboration personas can improve tool adoption by helping designers create collaboration tools that are better targeted to the goals, needs, and interactions between members of collaborative groups. We present a comparative study of design and user experience practitioners who used both collaboration personas and individual personas. Participants conducted a cognitive walkthrough and provided redesign suggestions for a collaboration tool. Our results show that the focus of the cognitive walkthrough and redesign task differed, with collaboration personas showing more group focus. Collaboration personas led to a more complete discussion, as indicated by a greater amount of time spent on the task compared to individual personas. Despite prior experience and training with individual personas, collaboration personas were preferred and better supported the task, since they focused on groups of people and their interactions.

Personas are a critical method for orienting design and development teams to user experience. Prior work has noted challenges in justifying them to developers. In contrast, it has been assumed that designers and user experience professionals - whose goal is to focus designs on targeted users - will readily exploit personas. This paper examines that assumption. We present the first study of how experienced user-centered design (UCD) practitioners with prior experience deploying personas, use and perceive personas in industrial software design. We identify limits to the persona approach in the context studied. Practitioners used personas almost exclusively for communication, but not for design. Participants identified four problems with personas, finding them abstract, impersonal, misleading and distracting. Our findings argue for a new approach to persona deployment and construction. Personas cannot replace immersion in actual user data. And rather than focusing on creating engaging personas, it is critical to avoid persona attributes that mislead or distract.

This workshop explores the future of personal video communications where systems and designs move beyond supporting conversations to a new design paradigm consisting of shared activities and experiences between distance-separated family and friends.

Video conferencing allows distance-separated family members to interact somewhat akin to being together at the same place and time. Yet most video conferencing systems are designed for phone-like calls between only two locations. Using such systems for long interactions or social gatherings with multiple families is cumbersome, if not impossible. For this reason, we wanted to explore how families would make use of a video system that permitted sharing everyday life over extended periods of time between multiple locations. We designed a media space called Family Portals that provides shared video between three locations and deployed it within the homes of six families. Results show that the media space increased feelings of connectedness and the focus on a triad, in contrast to a dyad, caused new styles of interaction to emerge. Despite this, families experienced new privacy challenges and non-adoption by some family members, not previously seen in dyadic family media spaces.

Video conferencing is a technology that families and friends use to connect with each other over distance. However, even with such technology readily available, we still do not have a good understanding of how video conferencing systems are used by people as a part of their domestic communication practices. For this reason, we have conducted interviews with 21 adults in the United States to understand video conferencing routines in the home and to inform the design of future domestic communication technologies. Our findings illustrate the importance of discerning availability and willingness to video conference prior to calling, the need to share everyday life activities in addition to conversation, and a need for new privacy protecting strategies that focus on autonomy and solitude as opposed to confidentiality.

Families have a strong need to connect with their loved ones over distance. However, most technologies do not provide the same feelings of connectedness that one feels from seeing remote family members. Hence our goal was to understand if a video connection, in the form of a media space, could help families feel more connected and what design factors would be critical for its success. To answer this, we designed a video media space called the Family Window and deployed it within the homes of two families for eight months and four families for five weeks. Our results show that always-on video can lead to an increase in feelings of connectedness by providing availability awareness and opportunities for sharing everyday life. However usage and value of such media spaces hinges on close-knit relationships and control over one's autonomy.

Applications that provide location-based experiences are an increasingly viable design space given the proliferation of GPS-enabled mobile devices. However, these applications are in their infancy, and we do not yet know what design factors will contribute to their success. For this reason, we have studied the well-established location-based experience of geocaching. We report on the results of a survey of geocachers along with observations from our own in-depth geocaching activities. Our findings illustrate that geocaching permits users to create a range of experiences for others within a permeable yet restricted culture of norms. Once created, geocaches are maintained by the community of geocachers through a well-designed groupware system. Here maintenance acts can be performed “in the small, ” given their lightweight and well-defined nature, and become less about maintenance and more about personal participation. These findings provide insight into how community and groupware can be leveraged to support applications for location-based experiences.

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