Virtual reality (VR) head-mounted displays allow designers to work in embodied ways within virtual environments. Yet despite growing industry interest, little is known about how VR supports or constrains 3D design workflows, leaving questions about its practical value. We explored the experiences and workflows of using head-mounted displays for 3D design through a 12-week study with 55 senior design students. Participants completed questionnaires, produced design projects, and kept journals, which we analyzed. Our results show that VR is viewed as a powerful design tool, where embodiment and spatial interaction underscore design as an immersive experience in its own right. VR excels in freehand design and sketching, but struggles with precision and complexity. However, VR can flexibly fit into broader workflows, where designers move fluently between VR and non-VR tools and activities. We present considerations for integrating VR into design processes, particularly how VR integrates with traditional 3D design tools and activities like sketching.

User Experience (UX) practitioners, like UX designers and researchers, have begun to adopt Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI) tools into their work practices. However, we lack an understanding of how UX practitioners, UX teams, and companies actually utilize GenAI and what challenges they face. We conducted interviews with 24 UX practitioners from multiple companies and countries, with varying roles and seniority. Our findings include: 1) There is a significant lack of GenAI company policies, with companies informally advising caution or leaving the responsibility to individual employees; 2) UX teams lack team-wide GenAI practices. UX practitioners typically use GenAI individually, favoring writing-based tasks, but note limitations for design-focused activities, like wireframing and prototyping; 3) UX practitioners call for better training on GenAI to enhance their abilities to generate effective prompts and evaluate output quality. Based on our findings, we provide recommendations for GenAI integration in the UX sector.

With the increasing popularity of cryptocurrency, many people are interested in cryptocurrency investments, but have so far hesitated. Many others have made investments without adequate preparation. To help interested investors improve their understanding of cryptocurrency and make rational investment decisions, it is important to study their concerns and motivations and to draw upon experienced investors’ experiences and practices. Therefore, we surveyed crypto investors and inexperienced potential investors interested in trading cryptocurrency (n = 395). Our results showed that extreme price volatility is the primary incentive and a substantial obstacle to market participation. Fraud risks, lack of personal funds, insufficient knowledge, and difficulty identifying credible information sources are also common barriers. Our findings highlight the need to build trustworthy exchange platforms and integrate educational features. Based on the reported concerns and experiences, we (1) identify learning components for new investors, and (2) formulate design recommendations for beginner-friendly exchange platforms.

Large crowds in public transit stations and vehicles introduce obstacles for wayfinding, hygiene, and physical distancing. Public displays that currently provide on-site transit information could also provide critical crowdedness information. Therefore, we examined people’s crowd perceptions and information preferences before and during the pandemic, and designs for visualizing crowdedness to passengers. We first report survey results with public transit users (n = 303), including the usability results of three crowdedness visualization concepts. Then, we present two animated crowd simulations on public displays that we evaluated in a field study (n = 44). We found that passengers react very positively to crowding information, especially before boarding a vehicle. Visualizing the exact physical spaces occupied on transit vehicles was most useful for avoiding crowded areas. However, visualizing the overall fullness of vehicles was the easiest to understand. We discuss design implications for communicating crowding information to support decision-making and promote a sense of safety.

We present MindPhone, a mindfulness-based intervention to tackle absentminded and excessive smartphone use. At unlock, MindPhone prompts one of two questions: what the user intends to do with the smartphone, or what the user intends to do in the real world after using their smartphone. Users may respond actively by writing, or passively by mentally reflecting. We evaluated the effectiveness of the two questions and two response modes in a mixed-method, 2x2 mixed field study with 28 participants over two weeks. Our results show that the real-world prompt significantly reduces absentminded use and encourages a quicker return to the real world, independent of the response mode. Asking about smartphone use intentions raises awareness of reasons for smartphone use. For everyday use of MindPhone, users wish to set the question and response mode based on context. We discuss including awareness of the physical world in future smartphone use interventions.

In this work, we explore attacker behavior during shoulder surfing. As such behavior is often opportunistic and difficult to observe in real world settings, we leverage the capabilities of virtual reality (VR). We recruited 24 participants and observed their behavior in two virtual waiting scenarios: at a bus stop and in an open office space. In both scenarios, participants shoulder surfed private screens displaying different types of content. From the results we derive an understanding of factors influencing shoulder surfing behavior, reveal common attack patterns, and sketch a behavioral shoulder surfing model. Our work suggests directions for future research on shoulder surfing and can serve as a basis for creating novel approaches to mitigate shoulder surfing.

The COVID-19 pandemic created unprecedented questions for touch-based public displays regarding hygiene, risks, and general awareness. We study how people perceive and consider hygiene on shared touchscreens, and how touchscreens could be improved through hygiene-related functions. First, we report the results from an online survey (n = 286). Second, we present a hygiene concept for touchscreens that visualizes prior touches and provides information about the cleaning of the display and number of prior users. Third, we report the feedback for our hygiene concept from 77 participants. We find that there is demand for improved awareness of public displays’ hygiene status, especially among those with stronger concerns about COVID-19. A particularly desired detail is when the display has been cleaned. For visualizing prior touches, fingerprints worked best. We present further considerations for designing for hygiene on public displays.

There are many situations where using personal devices is not socially acceptable, or where nearby people present a privacy risk. For these situations, we explore the concept of hidden interaction techniques through two prototype applications. HiddenHaptics allows users to receive information through vibrotactile cues on a smartphone, and HideWrite allows users to write text messages by drawing on a dimmed smartwatch screen. We conducted three user studies to investigate whether, and how, these techniques can be used without being exposed. Our primary findings are (1) users can effectively hide their interactions while attending to a social situation, (2) users seek to interact when another person is speaking, and they also tend to hide the interaction using their body or furniture, and (3) users can sufficiently focus on the social situation despite their interaction, whereas non-users feel that observing the user hinders their ability to focus on the social activity.

We investigate opportunities and challenges of running virtual reality (VR) studies remotely. Today, many consumers own head-mounted displays (HMDs), allowing them to participate in scientific studies from their homes using their own equipment. Researchers can benefit from this approach by being able to recruit study populations normally out of their reach, and to conduct research at times when it is difficult to get people into the lab (cf. the COVID pandemic). In an initial online survey ( N = 227), we assessed HMD owners’ demographics, their VR setups and their attitudes toward remote participation. We then identified different approaches to running remote studies and conducted two case studies for an in-depth understanding. We synthesize our findings into a framework for remote VR studies, discuss strengths and weaknesses of the different approaches, and derive best practices. Our work is valuable for Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) researchers conducting VR studies outside labs.

Field studies on public displays can be difficult, expensive, and time-consuming. We investigate the feasibility of using virtual reality (VR) as a test-bed to evaluate deployments of public displays. Specifically, we investigate whether results from virtual field studies, conducted in a virtual public space, would match the results from a corresponding real-world setting. We report on two empirical user studies where we compared audience behavior around a virtual public display in the virtual world to audience behavior around a real public display. We found that virtual field studies can be a powerful research tool, as in both studies we observed largely similar behavior between the settings. We discuss the opportunities, challenges, and limitations of using virtual reality to conduct field studies, and provide lessons learned from our work that can help researchers decide whether to employ VR in their research and what factors to account for if doing so.

360° videos can be viewed in an immersive manner with a head-mounted display (HMD). However, it is unclear how the viewing experience is affected by basic properties of 360° videos, such as how high they are recorded from, and whether there are people close to the camera. We conducted a 24-participant user study where we explored whether the viewing experience is affected by A) camera height, B) the proximity and actions of people appearing in the videos, and C) viewer position (standing/sitting). The results, surprisingly, suggest that the viewer's own height has little to no effect on the preferred camera height and the experience. The most optimal camera height situates at around 150 centimeters, which hits the comfortable height range for both sitting and standing viewers. Moreover, in some cases, people being close to the camera, or the camera being very low, has a negative effect on the experience. Our work contributes to understanding and designing immersive 360° experiences.

We present Pocket Transfers: interaction techniques that allow users to transfer content from situated displays to a personal mobile device while keeping the device in a pocket or bag. Existing content transfer solutions require direct manipulation of the mobile device, making inter-action slower and less flexible. Our introduced tech-niques employ touch, mid-air gestures, gaze, and a mul-timodal combination of gaze and mid-air gestures. We evaluated the techniques in a novel user study (N=20), where we considered dynamic scenarios where the user approaches the display, completes the task, and leaves. We show that all pocket transfer techniques are fast and seen as highly convenient. Mid-air gestures are the most efficient touchless method for transferring a single item, while the multimodal method is the fastest touchless method when multiple items are transferred. We provide guidelines to help researchers and practitioners choose the most suitable content transfer techniques for their systems.

This article presents a scalable, semi-automated process for studying the usage of public displays. The process consists of gathering anonymous interaction and skeletal data of passersby during public display deployment and programmatically analyzing the data. This article demonstrates the use of the process with the analysis of the Information Wall, a gesture-controlled public information display. Information Wall was deployed in a university campus for one year and collected an extensive data set of more than 100 000 passersby. The main benefits of the process include (1) gathering of large data sets without considerable use of resources, (2) fast, semi-automated data analysis, and (3) applicability to studying the effects of long-term public display deployments. In analyzing the usage and passersby data of the Information Wall in our validation study, the main findings uncovered using the method were (i) most users were first-time users exploring the system, and not many returned to use the system again, and (ii) many users were accompanied by passive users who observed interaction from further away, which could suggest a case of multi-user interaction blindness. In the past, logged data has mainly been used as a supporting method for in situ observations and interviews, and its use has required a considerable amount of manual work. In this article, we argue that logged data analysis can be automated to complement other methods, particularly in the evaluation of long-term deployments.

Public display deployments are often subjected to various surprising and unwanted effects. These effects are frequently due to external factors properties and phenomena that are unrelated to the deployment. Therefore, we conducted a literature review within the public display domain to investigate the causes behind the reported issues. This work presents a taxonomy of external factors affecting deployments, consisting of six categories: weather, events, surroundings, space, inhabitants, and vandalism. Apart from a few positive examples, we predominantly found negative effects arising from these factors. We then identified four ways of addressing the effects: ignoring, adapting, solving, and embracing. Of these, ignoring and adapting are substantially more frequent responses than solving and embracing emphasizing the need for researchers to adapt. We present real-world examples and insights on how researchers and practitioners can address the effects to better manage their deployments.

Most teleconferencing tools treat users in distributed meetings monolithically: all participants are meant to be interconnected in more-or-less the same manner. In practice, people connect to meetings in different contexts, sometimes sitting in front of a laptop or tablet giving their full attention, but at other times mobile and concurrently involved in other tasks or as a liminal participant in a larger group meeting. In this paper, we present the design and evaluation of two applications, MixMeetWear and MixMeetMate, to help users in non-standard contexts flexibly participate in meetings.

Public displays that allow users to interact with them through mid-air gestures are still relatively rare, as many applications rely on touch-based interaction. This paper introduces Information Wall, a gesture-controlled public information display that provides multi-user access to contextually relevant local information using remote pointing and mid-air gestures. The application has been studied in two settings: a lab-based user study and several short-term deployments. Based on our results, we present practical guidelines for gesture-controlled public display design.