Abstract Context: The rapid emergence of generative AI (GenAI) tools has begun to reshape software engineering practice. Yet, their adoption within agile environments remains underexplored. Objective: This study investigates how agile practitioners adopt GenAI tools in real-world organizational contexts, focusing on regulatory conditions, role-specific use cases, benefits, and barriers. Method: An exploratory multiple case study was conducted in three German organizations, involving 17 semi-structured interviews and document analysis. A cross-case thematic analysis was applied to identify GenAI adoption patterns. Results: Findings reveal that GenAI is primarily used for creative tasks, documentation, and code assistance. Benefits include efficiency gains and enhanced creativity, while barriers relate to data privacy, validation effort, and lack of governance. Using the Technology-Organization-Environment (TOE) framework, we find that these barriers stem from misalignments across the three dimensions. Regulatory pressures are often translated into policies without accounting for actual usage patterns or organizational constraints, leading to systematic policy-practice gaps and shadow IT behavior. Conclusion: GenAI offers significant potential to augment agile roles but requires alignment across TOE dimensions, including pragmatic policies, data protection measures, and user training to ensure responsible and effective integration.

This study examines the shifting discussions of teachers within the #twlz community on Twitter across three phases of the COVID-19 pandemic– before school closures and during the first and second school closures. Weanalyzed tweets from January 2020 to May 2021 to identify topics related to education, digital transforma tion, and the challenges of remote teaching. Using machine learning and ChatGPT, we categorized discussions that transitioned from general educational content to focused dialogues on online education tools during school closures. Before the pandemic, discussions were generally focused on education and digital transformation. During the first school closures, conversations shifted to more specific topics, such as online education and tools to adapt to distance learning. Discussions during the second school closures reflected more precise needs related to fluctuating pandemic conditions and schooling requirements. Our findings reveal a consistent in crease in the specificity and urgency of the topics over time, particularly regarding digital education

Abstract Voice user interface (VUI) systems, such as Alexa, Siri, and Google Assistant, are popular and widely available. Still, challenges such as privacy and the ability to have a dialog remain. In the latter example, the user expects a human‐like conversation, that is, that the VUI understands the dialog and its context. However, this VUI feature of context‐aware interaction is rather error prone. For this reason, we intend to explore the VUI context of use and its impact on interaction, that is, relevant user experience (UX). We see a demand for context‐dependent UX measurement because analyzing the context of use and UX assessment are both critical human‐centered design (HCD) methods. Therefore, we examine the VUI context of use by asking users about how, where, and for what they use VUIs, as well as their UX and improvement proposals. We interviewed people with disabilities who rely on VUIs and people without disabilities who use VUIs for convenience or fun. We identified VUI context‐of‐use categories and factors and explored their impacts on relevant UX qualities. Our result is a matrix containing these elements; thus, it provides an overview of the contextual UX of our target group's VUI interaction. We intend to develop a VUI context‐of‐use conceptual structure in the future based on this matrix, which is needed to create an automated context‐dependent UX measurement recommendation tool for VUIs. This conceptual structure could also be useful for automated UX testing in the context of VUI.

Voice user interface (VUI) evaluation often focuses on user experience (UX) quality measurement of UX aspects for VUIs. However, it is crucial to differ among these UX aspects concerning their relevance to specific target groups, like different usage contexts, or user characteristics such as age. Therefore, we identified potential age-specific characteristics and determine their nature, if any. We applied the Kano model using an age-segmentation to categorize these 32 UX aspects based on VUI user data (N = 384). Our findings reveal that UX aspects of VUIs are broadly consistent across all age groups, and VUI developers and researchers should consider the important ones. Some age effects are visible and could impact the success of VUIs.

As digital technologies advance, user experience (UX) has become crucial for software and services success. The User Experience Questionnaire Plus (UEQ+) is a flexible tool used to evaluate UX through questionnaires tailored to specific problems, yet a critical factor often overlooked is Trust. Trust, understood as a user’s belief in a software’s ability to function consistently, securely, and with respect for user data privacy, is especially pivotal in areas like financial services, health informatics, and e-commerce platforms. This paper focuses on the construction and validation of Trust as a new factor in the UEQ+. During the construction phase, an initial collection of potential items was assembled for the trust factor. A subsequent study involving 405 participants facilitated the reduction of these items to four, a task accomplished via factor analysis. The proceeding stages involved two additional validation phases, enlisting a total of 897 participants, wherein the selected items were subject to validation. The culmination of this process resulted in a newly validated factor, Trust, which is constituted by the following items: insecure-secure, untrustworthy-trustworthy, unreliable-reliable, and non-transparent-transparent.

We lack a shared and detailed understanding in gamification of what game elements are. To address this, we provide a scoping review of the last five years of gamification research, focusing primarily on how game elements have been applied and characterized. We retrieved the definitions of game elements from 280 research papers, conducted a content analysis, and identified their features. On the basis of this information, we provide responses regarding the frequently cited game elements, whether they are consistently characterized in the literature, and the frequently stated features of these elements. Our research has identified 15 game elements in the literature, with points, badges, and leaderboards being the most prevalent. As a first step toward clear definitions, we suggest a set of properties to characterize these game elements. The results of our review contribute to the formation of a consensus among gamification scholars about the application and definition of game elements.

Voice User Interfaces (VUIs) are becoming increasingly available while users raise, e.g., concerns about privacy issues. User Experience (UX) helps in the design and evaluation of VUIs with focus on the user. Knowledge of the relevant UX aspects for VUIs is needed to understand the user’s point of view when developing such systems. Known UX aspects are derived, e.g., from graphical user interfaces or expert-driven research. The user’s opinion on UX aspects for VUIs, however, has thus far been missing. Hence, we conducted a qualitative and quantitative user study to determine which aspects users take into account when evaluating VUIs. We generated a list of 32 UX aspects that intensive users consider for VUIs. These overlap with, but are not limited to, aspects from established literature. For example, while Efficiency and Effectivity are already well known, Simplicity and Politeness are inherent to known VUI UX aspects but are not necessarily focused. Furthermore, Independency and Context-sensitivity are some new UX aspects for VUIs.

The dynamically growing research area of gamification is loaded with a lack of consensus on definitions, a variety of non-validated frameworks, and few practical insights. Hence, we conducted a literature review to explore current best practices in applying gamification for integration in a practical use case. Instead, we found a narrow focus on theoretical discussions. For a stronger representation of practical research, standards need to be established for transferring gamification concepts to practical application. To fill this research gap, we designed a process and tools for a practical, human-centered, and context-related gamification application. We derived the process and tools from insights of our literature review as well as the realization of a gamification use case on a German online comparison platform. In addition, we incorporated standards such as the Human- Centered Design Process to maintain the established quality level of the field of user experience. In this paper, we present the Human-Centered Gamification Process (HCGP) and provide tools as practical guidance to lower the barrier for researchers and professionals to conduct theoretical and practical gamification projects.

Currently, voice assistants (VAs) are trendy and highly available. The VA adoption rate of internet users differs among European countries and also in the global view. Due to speech intelligibility and privacy concerns, using VAs is challenging. Additionally, user experience (UX) assessment methods and VA improvement possibilities are still missing, but are urgently needed to overcome users’ concerns and increase the adoption rate. Therefore, we conducted an intercultural study of technology-based users from Germany and Spain, expecting that higher improvement potential would outweigh concerns about VAs. We investigated VA use in terms of availability versus actual use, usage patterns, concerns, and improvement proposals. Comparing Germany and Spain, our findings show that nearly the same amount of intensive VA use is found in both technology-based user groups. Despite cultural differences, further results show very similar tendencies, e.g., frequency of use, privacy concerns, and demand for VA improvements.

Playing error-based exercises presented in a computer game was found to significantly improve the spelling skills of children with dyslexia in Spanish. Since there are no similar error-based exercises for German, we adapted the method to German and created 2,500 new word exercises. Since dyslexia manifestations are language dependent, the replication of the method required (i) collecting new texts written by German children with dyslexia; (ii) the annotation and the linguistic analysis of the errors; and (iii) the creation of exercises as well as their integration in the tool.

Recent interest in the development of ambient light systems has initialized a new research area, where the number of ambient light systems is expected to increase in the next years. To support the development of future ambient light systems, we need clear, explicit, and structured design guidelines. In this paper we present an evaluation of light patterns in a controlled laboratory study with two complementary parts. In the first part, our aim was to reveal and analyze light patterns that encode different types of everyday information. In the second part, we verified the results from the first part by asking another group of participants about their understanding of information encoded with light. Together, our results allowed us to establish light patterns and guidelines for building new ambient light systems and applications in the future.