People worldwide are increasingly acquiring collections of virtual possessions. While virtual possessions have become ubiquitous, little work exists on how people value and form attachments to these things. To investigate, we conducted a study with 48 young adults from South Korea, Spain and the United States. The study probed on participants' perceived value of their virtual possessions as compared to their material things, and the comparative similarities and differences across cultures. Findings show that young adults live in unfinished spaces and that they often experience a sense of fragmentation when trying to integrate their virtual possessions into their lives. These findings point to several design opportunities, such as tools for life story-oriented archiving, and insights on better forms of Cloud storage.

Deaf users might find it difficult to navigate through websites with textual content which, for many of them, constitutes the written representation of a non-native oral language. With the aim of testing how the information structure could compensate for this difficulty, 27 prelingual deaf users of sign language were asked to search a set of headlines in a web newspaper where information structure and practice were manipulated. While practice did not affect deep structures (web content distributed through four layers of nodes), wide structures (web content concentrated in two layers) did facilitate users' performance in the last trial block and compromised it in the first trial block. It is argued that wide structures generate a textual information overload for deaf users, which decreases with practice. Thus, wide structures seem preferable for websites requiring frequent use, rather than for those intended for occasional interaction.

This paper explores the effect of substituting textual links for graphical ones on the performance of deaf signers in hypertext information retrieval (HIR). Both deaf and hearing users found more targets, were faster and became less disoriented in the verbal hypertext interface than in the graphical one. Deaf users were outperformed by hearing users in all conditions except in short paths with the graphical interface. The results and its applied consequences, which would be also relevant to other users with similar problems than those of deaf signers (elderly people, people with dyslexia, people navigating in a website using a foreign language or people with low literacy) are discussed in relation to the CoLiDeS model of web interaction (Kitajima et al. 2000 Kitajima, M., Blackmon, M. H. and Polson, P. G.A. 2000. “Comprehension-based model of Web navigation and its application to Web usability analysis”. In People and Computers XIV Edited by: McDonald, S., Waern, Y. and Cockton, G. 357–373. UK )Springer) [Google Scholar]) and to the overgeneralisation of ‘Picture superiority effect’ (Nelson et al. 1976 Nelson, D. L., Reed, U. S. and Walling, J. R. 1976. Picture superiority effect. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Learning and Memory, 2: 523–528. [Crossref], [PubMed] , [Google Scholar]).

The facilitative effect of expertise in hypertext information retrieval (IR) tasks has been widely reported in related literature. However, recent theories of human expertise question the robustness of this result, since previous works have not fully considered the interaction between user and system characteristics. In this study, the constraint attunement hypothesis (CAH) is considered in order to predict that the effect of expertise in IR would appear only when the user and system characteristics can be combined successfully. Results from an experiment revealed that expert users outperformed novice users in IR when the elements of a system interface are organized semantically, but not when organized randomly. Results are discussed in the framework of the CAH supporting the interactive nature of human behaviour in HCI.