We present Speeching, a mobile application that uses crowdsourcing to support the self-monitoring and management of speech and voice issues for people with Parkinson's (PwP). The application allows participants to audio record short voice tasks, which are then rated and assessed by crowd workers. Speeching then feeds these results back to provide users with examples of how they were perceived by listeners unconnected to them (thus not used to their speech patterns). We conducted our study in two phases. First we assessed the feasibility of utilising the crowd to provide ratings of speech and voice that are comparable to those of experts. We then conducted a trial to evaluate how the provision of feedback, using Speeching, was valued by PwP. Our study highlights how applications like Speeching open up new opportunities for self-monitoring in digital health and wellbeing, and provide a means for those without regular access to clinical assessment services to practice and get meaningful feedback on their speech.

Online and digital technologies support and extend the action repertoires of localized social movements. In this paper we examine the ways by which digital technologies can support "on-the-ground" activist communities in the development of social movements. After identifying some of the challenges of deploying conventional voting and consultation technologies for activism, we examine situated political action in local communities through the design and deployment of a low-cost community voting prototype, PosterVote. We deploy PosterVote in two case studies with two local community organizations identifying the features that supported or hindered grassroots democratic practices. Through interviews with these communities, we explore the design of situated voting systems to support participation within an ecology of social action.

While theatre has been used in HCI as a tool for engaging participants in design processes, the specific benefits of using live theatre over other communicative mediums, remains underexplored. In this paper we introduce Experience Design Theatre (EDT) as an approach to undertaking experience-centered design with multiple parties in the early stages of design. EDT was motivated by a need to involve several diverse groups of people in the design of a digitally coordinated care service - NetCarers. We used live theatre as a way to engage small groups of participants in dialogues around the design of NetCarers, to qualify their contributions in a refined performance, and to communicate their concerns and aspirations to domain experts. We highlight key benefits to using live theatre in experience-centered design and offer insights for researchers undertaking similar work in the future.

This paper reports on a qualitative study of 38 low-income individuals living in the North East of England. The participants' experiences of money, banking and the role digital technology plays in their financial practices were identified through semi-structured interviews in people's homes and group workshops. A grounded theory analysis of these data characterises how technology both helped and hindered participants to keep close control of their finances. These findings suggest design opportunities for future digital banking technologies that extend the already sophisticated practices of individuals managing a low income, focusing on: delaying, prioritising, planning, watching, and hiding monetary transactions.

The joint study of computer security, privacy and human-computer interaction (HCI) over the last two decades has shaped a research agenda focused upon usable privacy & security. However, in HCI research more generally there has long been an awareness of the need to understand and design for user experience, in recognition of the complex and multi-faceted role that technology now plays in our lives. In this paper we add to the growing discussion by introducing the notion of experience-centered privacy and security. We argue that in order to engage users of technology around issues related to experiences of privacy and security, research methods are required that may be outside of the normal repertoire of methods that we typically call upon. We describe three projects that developed non-typical research methods to reveal experiential insights into user interactions with privacy and security-related technologies. We conclude by proposing a research agenda that begins to illustrate how the discourse and methods of experience-centered design might serve to provide valuable alternative perspectives on new and enduring user-facing privacy and security problems.

Delegation is the practice of sharing authority with another individual to enable them to complete a specific task as a proxy. Practices to permit delegation can range from formal to informal arrangements and can involve spontaneous yet finely balanced notions of trust between people. This paper argues that delegation is a ubiquitous yet an unsupported feature of socio-technical computer systems and that this lack of support illustrates a particular neglect to the everyday financial practices of the more vulnerable people in society. Our contribution is to provide a first exploration of the domain of person-to-person delegation in digital payments, a particularly pressing context. We first report qualitative data collected across several studies concerning banking practices of individuals over 80 years of age. We then use analytical techniques centred upon identification of stakeholders, their concerns and interactions, to characterize the delegation practices we observed. We propose a Concerns Matrix as a suitable representation to capture conflicts in the needs of individuals in such complex socio-technical systems, and finally propose a putative design response in the form of a Helper Card.

Graphical password systems based upon the recall and reproduction of visual patterns (e.g. as seen on the Google Android platform) are assumed to have desirable usability and memorability properties. However, there are no empirical studies that explore whether this is actually the case on an everyday basis. In this paper, we present the results of a real world user study across 21 days that was conducted to gather such insight; we compared the performance of Android-like patterns to personal identification numbers (PIN), both on smartphones, in a field study. The quantitative results indicate that PIN outperforms the pattern lock when comparing input speed and error rates. However, the qualitative results suggest that users tend to accept this and are still in favor of the pattern lock to a certain extent. For instance, it was rated better in terms of ease-of-use, feedback and likeability. Most interestingly, even though the pattern lock does not provide any undo or cancel functionality, it was rated significantly better than PIN in terms of error recovery; this provides insight into the relationship between error prevention and error recovery in user authentication.

Invisible Design is a technique for generating insights and ideas with workshop participants in the early stages of concept development. It involves the creation of ambiguous films in which characters discuss a technology that is not directly shown. The technique builds on previous work in HCI on scenarios, persona, theatre, film and ambiguity. The Invisible Design approach is illustrated with three examples from unrelated projects; Biometric Daemon, Panini and Smart Money. The paper presents a qualitative analysis of data from a series of workshops where these Invisible Designs were discussed. The analysis outlines responses to the films in terms of; existing problems, concerns with imagined technologies and design speculation. It is argued that Invisible Design can help to create a space for critical and creative dialogue during participatory concept development.

The usability of graphical passwords based upon recognition of images is widely explored. However, it is likely that their observed high memorability is contingent on certain attributes of the image sets presented to users. Characterizing this relationship remains an open problem; for example, there is no systematic (and empirically verified) method to determine how similarity between the elements of an image set impacts the usability of the login challenge. Strategies to assemble suitable images are usually carried out by hand, which represents a significant barrier to uptake as the process has usability and security implications. In this paper, we explore the role of simple image processing techniques to provide automated assembly of usable login challenges in the context of recognition-based graphical passwords. We firstly carry out a user study to obtain a similarity ranked image set, and use the results to select an optimal per-pixel image similarity metric. Then we conduct a short-term image recall test using Amazon Mechanical Turk with 343 subjects where we manipulated the similarity present in image grids. In the most significant case, we found that our automated methods to choose decoy images could impact the login success rate by 40%, and the median login duration by 35 seconds.

This paper describes a project exploring the design of digital payment services in collaboration with 16 people aged over 80. Many older people find cheques valuable as a means of payment but the UK Payments Council recently proposed their abolition. We describe two designs that simultaneously aimed to preserve and augment the paper cheque as a means of making electronic payments. These were devised during participatory design workshops through critical dialogues with our eighty something participants. Workshop discussions resulted in the creation of a real world cheque system where we issued pre-paid cheques without the involvement of banks. This work informed the development of a digital cheque book based on Anoto digital pen technology. The work illustrates the value of participatory design with 'extraordinary' users, such as the eighty somethings, in HCI.

This paper reports findings from a series of participatory design workshops with ten people over eighty years old. The focus of the workshops was new banking technologies for the older old. Participants were asked to discuss their current experiences of banking and given packs of concept cards which contained design sketches and brief outlines of concepts for new financial services. The designs on the cards were deliberately provocative and aimed to encourage criticism and debate. Participants wrote and drew on the cards and the workshops were recorded and transcribed. The participants were extremely critical of current banking practices and most of the new concepts we presented to them. Their questions and comments led to a number of insights and further iterations. The paper argues that critique is an essential resource for design, both in terms of identifying problems and iterating ideas.

We present findings from the deployment of a mobile application, Take and Give, which allows users to place image files in a virtual folder or 'Pocket' on a mobile phone. This content can be viewed by a set of 'Buddies', who can, if they wish, attempt to take ownership of a file for themselves, following which they can keep it, delete it, or place it in the Pocket of someone else. There is only one version of each file, creating a twist on traditional sharing technologies. We report findings from a three week trial of the application in an office space, and describe how Take and Give provided a means of self-presentation and supported a sense of awareness, mutual attentiveness and connectedness. Our findings suggest that the taking of unique content can be an engaging form of sharing and can facilitate awareness and connectedness between people.

A cheque is a paper document that orders the transfer of money between bank accounts. Whilst an eighty-year-old in the UK is predicted on average to live at least another ten years, cheques may not. Despite many older peoples extensive use of cheques, UK banks are eager to abolish them and design electronic alternatives that are less costly to process and less vulnerable to fraud. This paper reports on two qualitative studies that explored the banking experiences of 23 people over eighty years old. Cheques support financial collaboration with others in ways that digital payment systems do not. We argue that whilst it might be possible to improve the design of digital payment systems to better support financial collaboration, the case for retaining and enhancing cheques is stronger. Rather than replace cheques, we must design ways of making them less costly to process and better linked to electronic payment methods.

The introduction of tabletop interfaces has given rise to the need for the development of secure and usable authentication techniques that are appropriate for the co-located collaborative settings for which they have been designed. Most commonly, user authentication is based on something you know, but this is a particular problem for tabletop interfaces, as they are particularly vulnerable to shoulder surfing given their remit to foster co-located collaboration. In other words, tabletop users would typically authenticate in full view of a number of observers. In this paper, we introduce and evaluate a number of novel tabletop authentication schemes that exploit the features of multi-touch interaction in order to inhibit shoulder surfing. In our pilot work with users, and in our formal user-evaluation, one authentication scheme - Pressure-Grid - stood out, significantly enhancing shoulder surfing resistance when participants used it to enter both PINs and graphical passwords.

Graphical password systems based on the recognition of photographs are candidates to alleviate current over-reliance on alphanumeric passwords and PINs. However, despite being based on a simple concept -- and user evaluations consistently reporting impressive memory retention -- only one commercial example exists and overall take-up is low. Barriers to uptake include a perceived vulnerability to observation attacks; issues regarding deployability; and the impact of innocuous design decisions on security not being formalized. Our contribution is to dissect each of these issues in the context of mobile devices -- a particularly suitable application domain due to their increasing significance, and high potential to attract unauthorized access. This produces: 1) A novel yet simple solution to the intersection attack that permits greater variability in login challenges; 2) Detailed analysis of the shoulder surfing threat that considers both simulated and human testing; 3) A first look at image processing techniques to contribute towards automated photograph filtering. We operationalize our observations and gather data in a field context where decentralized mechanisms of varying entropy were installed on the personal devices of participants. Across two working weeks success rates collected from users of a high entropy version were similar to those of a low entropy version at 77%, and login durations decreased significantly across the study.

One common practice in relation to alphanumeric passwords is to write them down or share them with a trusted friend or colleague. Graphical password schemes often claim the advantage that they are significantly more secure with respect to both verbal disclosure and writing down. We investigated the reality of this claim in relation to the Passfaces graphical password scheme. By collecting a corpus of naturalistic descriptions of a set of 45 faces, we explored participants' ability to associate descriptions with faces across three conditions in which the decoy faces were selected: (1) at random; (2) on the basis of their visual similarity to the target face; and (3) on the basis of the similarity of the verbal descriptions of the decoy faces to the target face. Participants were found to perform significantly worse when presented with visual and verbally grouped decoys, suggesting that Passfaces can be further secured for description. Subtle differences in both the nature of male and female descriptions, and male and female performance were also observed.

Draw a secret (DAS) is a representative graphical password scheme. Rigorous theoretical analysis suggests that DAS supports an overall password space larger than that of the ubiquitous textual password scheme. However, recent research suggests that DAS users tend to choose weak passwords, and their choices would render this theoretically sound scheme less secure in real life. In this paper we investigate the novel idea of introducing background images to the DAS scheme, where users were initially supposed to draw passwords on a blank canvas overlaid with a grid. Encouraging results from our two user studies have shown that people aided with background images tended to set significantly more complicated passwords than their counterparts using the original scheme. The background images also reduced other predictable characteristics in DAS passwords such as symmetry and centering within the drawing grid, further improving the strength of the passwords. We estimate that the average strength of successfully recalled passwords in the enhanced scheme was increased over those created using the original scheme by more than 10 bits. Moreover, a positive effect was observed with respect to the memorability of the more complex passwords encouraged by the background images

Personal identification numbers (PINs) and hardware tokens are often used together for authentication purposes, e.g., in financial transactions with ATM machines. However, many people cannot remember their PINs. This has caused insecure practice, extra management cost, or both. In this paper, we evaluate FacePIN, a solution proposed to improve the security and memorability of the PIN scheme.

A potential drawback of graphical password schemes is that they are more vulnerable to shoulder surfing than conventional alphanumeric text passwords. We present a variation of the Draw-a-Secret scheme originally proposed by Jermyn et al [1] that is more resistant to shoulder surfing through the use of a qualitative mapping between user strokes and the password, and the use of dynamic grids to both obfuscate attributes of the user secret and encourage them to use different surface realizations of the secret. The use of qualitative spatial relations relaxes the tight constraints on the reconstruction of a secret; allowing a range of deviations from the original. We describe QDAS (Qualitative Draw-A-Secret), an initial implementation of this graphical password scheme, and the results of an empirical study in which we examined the memorability of secrets, and their susceptibility to shoulder-surfing attacks, for both Draw-A-Secret and QDAS.