Medical training is a key element in maintaining and improving today's healthcare standards. Given the nature of medical work, students must master not only theory but also develop their hands-on abilities and skills in clinical practice. Medical simulators play an increasing role in supporting the active learning of these students due to their ability to present a large variety of tasks allowing students to train and experiment indefinitely without causing any patient harm. While the criticality of explainable AI systems has been extensively discussed in the literature, the medical training context presents unique user needs for explanations. In this paper, we explore the potential gap of current limitations within simulation-based training, and the role Artificial Intelligence (AI) holds in supporting the needs of medical students in training. Through contextual inquiries and interviews with clinicians in training (N = 9) and subsequent validation with medical experts (N = 4), we obtain an understanding of the shortcomings in current simulation-based training and offer recommendations for future AI-driven training. Our results stress the need for continuous and actionable feedback that resembles the interaction between clinical supervisor and resident in real-world training scenarios while adjusting training material to the residents' skills and prior performance.

Individuals are increasingly interested in and responsible for assessing their own health. This study evaluates a fictional AI dermatologist for assistance in the self-assessment of moles. Building on the Signalling Theory, we tested the effect of textual descriptions provided by a virtual dermatologist, as manipulated across ‘Ability’, ‘Integrity, ’ and ‘Benevolence’, along with the clinical assessment, ‘benign’ or ‘malignant’, affect users’ trust in the aforementioned trust pillars. Our study (N = 40) follows a 2 (Ability low/high) × 2 (Integrity low/high) × 2 (Benevolence low/high) × 2 (mole assessment benign/malignant) within-subject factorial design. Our results demonstrate that we can successfully influence perceptions of ability and benevolence by manipulating the corresponding aspects of trust but not perceived integrity. Further, in the case of a malignant assessment, participants’ perception of trust increased across all aspects. Our results provide insights into the design of AI support systems for sensitive use cases, such as clinical self-assessments.

In the 1979 book “The Meaning of Things” Csikszentmihalyi and Rochberg-Halton studied people’s perception of the significance of things in the home. They emphasized how things influence the self, and vice versa. We propose that their method and analytical framework can help to understand the analogous question for smartphones: Why are some apps special to users? Using the framework, we conduct and analyze 60 interviews with people aged 21 to 41; with participants’ consent, we made the anonymized transcripts publicly available. The analysis of the interviews shows that participants find apps special because they are convenient, support personal goals and social communication, help them remember, and serve emotional functions. Participants report that their identity is intertwined with certain apps, even if they are annoying or cause dependency. Importantly, we also find that participants actively regulate their use of apps through their organization and particular use strategies.

Personal audio technologies empower individuals to manage their own auditory environment, affording control over both digital and real-world sounds. However, this control comes at a potential cost to social interaction, awareness of surroundings, and safety. This paper explores and investigates leveraging personal audio technologies as mediators in establishing personal audio spaces in homes. Our research methodology consisted of two key phases. Initially, a series of design workshops involving 16 participants were conducted to explore potential enhancements to everyday listening situations through technology. Subsequently, a within-subjects mixed-method study with 18 participants was undertaken to investigate the user experience of employing personal audio technologies to create a personalised audio space. The findings provide insights into future opportunities for listening practices, audio content, interpersonal listening, enhancing listening experiences as well as experiential components. Drawing from our results, we engage in a discussion on the potential manifestations of personal audio spaces, while also addressing current technological limitations and suggesting avenues for future research directions.

Integrating UX into industry practices is a well-researched topic particularly for software companies. However, little is known about how UX integration and adoption ‘works’ within the robotics industry. This study identifies behaviours impeding UX adoption at the individual, team, and organisational level within a company developing robots. We carried out a one-year long Action Research study in a large, international company during design and development of a service robot. Based on a UX maturity assessment, we carried out six interventions, where the researcher and practitioners worked deliberately with UX competence-development and the company's UX culture. Together we identified six barriers: achieving appropriate confidence levels, trust in UX, commitment and support structures, trade-offs in UX, handover practices, and UX management. To address these barriers, we developed and tested 21 strategies to help foster good UX practices and promote a ‘UX-friendly’ culture that empowers non-UX professionals to drive user-involved initiatives themselves.

Sound zone technology enables multiple people to have personal and shared listening experiences without disturbing each other. Methods for constructing sound zones have now matured enough to allow installations outside of experimental laboratories, making it essential for further development to conduct empirical studies about how people adopt, use, and interact with sound zones in, e.g., domestic settings. To that end, we conducted a four-week field study with a sound zone system in five households. Through an inductive reflexive thematic analysis, we identify three themes relating to 1) experiencing sound zones in everyday life, 2) sound zone usage patterns in households, and 3) interacting with sound zones. Based on these themes, we discuss how sound zones can be used to manage sound in homes in new ways to allow for better social coexistence and listening experiences. We present four directions for future HCI research and interaction design to comply with user needs and considerations when using this novel technology.

Professional service robots are increasingly being deployed in public places, which thus increases user exposure. However, we lack an empirical understanding of complex encounters taking place in dynamic and often crowded environments as well as how people overcome breakdowns during unguided interaction with a robot in a real-world scenario. In this paper, we conducted a covert, digital ethnographic study analyzing 104 user-generated YouTube videos focusing on people’s unguided interactions with robots in several public places. We identified several types of interaction breakdowns pertaining to someone (person-initiated interaction breakdown, IB) or something (environmental disturbances, ED) having a direct, negative effect on an ongoing unguided interaction. Our findings have implications for the design and development of service robots facing multi-user scenarios entertaining active (primary and secondary) users, inactive (commentators and observers) ‘users’, and Incidentally Co-present Persons (InCoPs) . Furthermore, we contribute to and built on the limited prior use of YouTube videos and digital ethnography in HRI research, thereby demonstrating its effectiveness in studying unguided interactions in public places, while supplementing and adding to the existing knowledge base of service robots in public places.

Bringing AI technology into clinical practice has proved challenging for system designers and medical professionals alike. The academic literature has, for example, highlighted the dangers of black-box decision-making and biased datasets. Furthermore, end-users’ ability to validate a system’s performance often disappears following the introduction of AI decision-making. We present the MAP model to understand and describe the three stages through which medical observations are interpreted and handled by AI systems. These stages are Measurement, in which information is gathered and converted into data points that can be stored and processed; Algorithm, in which computational processes transform the collected data; and Presentation, where information is returned to the user for interpretation. For each stage, we highlight possible challenges that need to be overcome to develop Human-Centred AI systems. We illuminate our MAP model through complementary case studies on colonoscopy practice and dementia diagnosis, providing examples of the challenges encountered in real-world settings. By defining Human-AI interaction across these three stages, we untangle some of the inherent complexities in designing AI technology for clinical decision-making, and aim to overcome misalignment between medical end-users and AI researchers and developers.

Sound zone technology allows multiple simultaneous sound experiences for multiple people in the same room without interference. However, given the inherent invisible and intangible nature of sound zones, it is unclear how to communicate the position and size of sound zones to users. This paper compares two visualisation techniques; absolute visualisation, relational visualisation, as well as a baseline condition without visualisations. In a within-subject experiment (N = 33), we evaluated these techniques for effectiveness and efficiency across four representative tasks. Our findings show that the absolute and relational visualisation techniques increase effectiveness in multi-user tasks but not in single-user tasks. The efficiency for all tasks was improved using visualisations. We discuss the potential of visualisations for sound zones and highlight future research opportunities for sound zone interaction.

Tangible input has been explored as a means for participants to self-report experiences while minimising disruption and allowing for discrete data collection. However, the accuracy of these tangible devices has not been studied systematically. We compared six input techniques, including slider, slider with resistance, capacitive touch slider, squeeze, rotary knob, and joystick, to understand their accuracy and resolution profile. Each of these wireless devices was designed in a similar form factor and intended to be operated discretely with one hand. We assessed input accuracy and participant perceptions across devices through a controlled lab study (N = 20), highlighting diverging limits to the accuracy of the input technique and possible explanations for the differences in resolution. Our results indicate that participant accuracy was highest using a slider, and lowest using a squeeze-based input. We discuss the suitability and challenges of discreet tangible self-report techniques, and highlight open research questions for future work.

Introducing robots in the workplace entails new practices and configurations at the individual, organizational, and social levels. Prior work has focused on how robots may have an immediate effect on individual employees or tasks rather than collectively influencing employees or the organizations they work for gradually over time. By drawing on fourteen in-situ interviews with six collaborative robot (cobot) operators at a Danish manufacturing company, this paper investigates how cobots in the manufacturing context may engage broader interactions beyond the robot-operator interaction. Our focus includes spatial configurations centering around the cobots, social interactions between employees, and information flow through, within, and outside the production cells. Introducing and implementing cobots in the workplace has social dynamics at its core, which we explore in depth. This paper argues that the design of cobots and the environment around them should accommodate the possibility of more complicated social and organizational changes brought about by these robots. Lastly, we discuss research and design implications for the future of workplaces involving robots.

We investigate how collaboration is understood and configured in industrial workplaces with collaborative robots (cobots). Through a qualitative analysis of 115 case studies of companies using cobots and 14 semi-structured interviews with cobot manufacturers and users, we examine the usages of cobots in the manufacturing industry over the entire temporal spectrum from pre-introduction to completed implementation. By synthesizing diverse stakeholders' perspectives, we present a set of main findings; key roles of a few supportive production workers during the adoption of cobots; a fragmentation of work tasks and the resulting loss of job identity among workers; the disunified meaning of "collaboration" which is under constant development; and the collaborative space and the working rhythms between production workers and cobots. By reconsidering what collaboration means in the workplace with cobots, we propose the concept of bounded collaboration, which means that the anticipated collaboration is manifested in a partial and limited manner within a collaborative technology. Finally, we provide practical suggestions for examining and supporting organizations and users in their adoption of cobots.

Going beyond dyadic (one-to-one) interaction has been increasingly explored in HRI. Yet we lack a comprehensive view on non-dyadic interaction research in HRI. To map out 15 years of works investigating non-dyadic interaction, and thereby identifying the trend of the field and future research areas, we performed a literature review containing all 164 publications (2006-2020) from the HRI conference investigating non-dyadic interaction. Our approach is inspired by the 4C framework, an interaction framework focusing on understanding and categorising different types of interaction between humans and digital artefacts. The 4C framework consists of eight interaction principles for multi-user/multi-artefact interaction categorised into four broader themes. We modified the 4C framework to increase applicability and relevance in the context of non-dyadic human-robot interaction. We identify an increasing tendency towards non-dyadic research (36% in 2020), as well as a focus on simultaneous studies (85% from 2006-2020) over sequential. We also articulate seven interaction principles utilised in non-dyadic HRI and provide specific examples. Last, based on our findings, we discuss several salient points of non-dyadic HRI, the applicability of the modified 4C framework to HRI and potential future topics of interest as well as open-questions for non-dyadic research.

Data have played an extensive role in sustainable HCI research by informing the impacts of our behavior on the environment and helping us make better environmental choices. However, in the area of sustainable food consumption and sustainable HCI, there is little investigation on the roles of food data for the design of technology. This paper presents findings from a qualitative study of sustainable-conscious individuals’ food data seeking experiences. Our results show the way in which the current food data is challenging our understanding of its environmental impacts, which concern data of availability, data representations, and data cultures. Drawing from Loukissas’ six critical data principles, we discuss how “locality” and ”place” could cast a new insight on food and its sustainability. We also offer possible design directions for sustainable HCI technologies utilizing food data.

This study analysed work activity in a hospital basement where humans and robots interacted and cooperated on logistics tasks. The robots were deployed to automate parts of courier processes and improve the work environment for the hospital's kitchen staff. Human–robot cooperation was studied through ethnographic fieldwork relating to mobile service robots and hospital kitchen staff. The results highlighted problems arising through the assumption that the ‘plug and play’ service robots could effectively automate work tasks. The analysis revealed the complexity of human–robot interaction in dynamic work settings such as hospitals and identified contradictions between the envisioning and realisation of robots at work, as well as the visible and invisible procedures underpinning human–robot cooperation. Consequently, we emphasise the importance of considering robots as agents of change and draw attention to the new work practices that arise when robots assume the roles of workers in dynamic work settings.

The uptake of artificial intelligence-based applications raises concerns about the fairness and transparency of AI behaviour. Consequently, the Computer Science community calls for the involvement of the general public in the design and evaluation of AI systems. Assessing the fairness of individual predictors is an essential step in the development of equitable algorithms. In this study, we evaluate the effect of two common visualisation techniques (text-based and scatterplot) and the display of the outcome information (i.e., ground-truth) on the perceived fairness of predictors. Our results from an online crowdsourcing study (N = 80) show that the chosen visualisation technique significantly alters people’s fairness perception and that the presented scenario, as well as the participant’s gender and past education, influence perceived fairness. Based on these results we draw recommendations for future work that seeks to involve non-experts in AI fairness evaluations.

Out of hospital cardiac arrest is a life-threatening event that requires immediate resuscitation actions. Therefore, digital volunteer responder initiatives integrate nearby users who can be activated anytime, anywhere through mobile technologies to assist in administering first aid. While research has found that such initiatives increases the chances of surviving, we know little about how responders use the digital services, and how they organize themselves before, during, and after responding. We conducted interviews with volunteer responders (N=16) to address how they perceive these initiatives and in particular how they negotiate availability temporally (anytime) and spatially (anywhere) for such life-threatening events. Our findings show that our responders exhibited strong perceptions of how and why one should volunteer. Also, the temporal aspect of being available anytime integrates several dimensions, while being available anywhere is highly related to safety, community and group roles. Finally, we discuss implications for design of volunteer responder initiatives.

Domestic robots such as vacuum cleaners or lawnmowers are becoming popular consumer products in private homes, but while current HCI research on domestic robots has highlighted for example personalisation, long-term effects, or design guidelines, little attention has been paid to automation. To address this, we conducted a qualitative study with 24 participants in private households using interviews, contextual technology tours, and robot deployment. Through thematic analysis we identified three themes related to 1) work routines and automation, 2) domestic robot automation and the physical environment, as well as 3) interaction and breakdown intervention. We present an empirical understanding of how task automation using domestic robots can be implemented in the home. Lastly, we discuss our findings in relation to existing literature and highlight three opportunities for improved task automation using domestic robots for future research.

Public transportation in rural areas is difficult due to low numbers of passengers and diverse needs, also reflected in the last mile problem that points to the distance to access transportation hubs in order to connect with core networks of transportation. In this paper, we study public transportation in rural areas using a digital-enabled, demand-responsive service called Plustur. This service was recently introduced as an effort to increase mobility in underserved rural areas by creating routes ad-hoc to answer to the last mile(s). We study how passengers and drivers understand Plustur, as well as experience the role of passenger. Our findings show that Plustur is viewed as a benefit for autonomy of mobility in rural areas, however is lacking in addressing integration of modes of mobilities, flexibility and spontaneous trips. We contribute with design implications for digital multimodal mobility services.

Tabletop interactions can support various social activities such as collaborative review of dynamic sales information in the business setting or route planning with an interactive map among others. Sharing control between users of interactive surfaces can be difficult to ensure participation and efficiency for co-located contexts. We explore the differences between two modalities for interacting with a tabletop map including interactions with a voice assistant and tangible interactions with a shape-changing controller. To simulate a shared goal-oriented situation, we use the context of shared autonomous mobility and compare the tangible controller with voice input through simulated tasks of route planning and detours. The findings suggest that the most suitable interaction modality depends on user preferences, scenarios, and contexts. Tangible controls work well for communicating the state of the system and facilitating discussion, while voice can be more pragmatic and task oriented.

During the last decade, people have started to experiment with insertable technology like RFID or NFC chips and use them for e.g. identification. However, little is known about how people in fact interact with and adapt insertables. We conducted a video analysis of 122 YouTube videos to gain insight into the interaction with the insertables. Second, we implemented an online survey to complement our data from the video analysis. Our findings show that there are many opportunities for interaction with insertables both for task-oriented and creative purposes. However, there are also multiple challenges and obstacles as well as side effects and health concerns. Our findings conclude that the current infrastructure is not ready to support the use of insertables yet, and we discuss implications of this.

Human--building interaction (HBI) is converging the fields of architecture and interaction design, leading to new and interesting tensions in perspectives and methodological approaches. One such tension is related to temporal constraints. Architecture and interaction design typically produce outcomes with very different lifetime expectancies and, predominantly, use methods with very different pace. As an example, fast, iterative approaches of contemporary interaction design, consisting of frequent updates and redesigns, contrasts with much slower, plan-driven and long-term vision driven approaches within architecture. One question emerging from this tension is how to meaningfully combine perspectives and approaches. One suggestion, among others, has been that interaction design methods such as participatory design can be used to heighten the involvement of inhabitants and other stakeholders in continuous adaptations of the buildings they inhabit. While an interesting proposal, we believe that methodological considerations only partly address the complexity of the tension at play from the different lifetime expectancies of buildings and interactive computer systems. Unfolding this complexity further, we therefore propose a framework of temporal constraints at three levels of abstraction: (1) rationale, (2) method, and (3) outcome. Inspired by previous work, we discuss temporal constraints in HBI at these levels. We argue that designing for HBI requires an understanding of temporally constrained design conventions that apply meaningfully to both the short term and long term.

Within sustainable HCI research, we have witnessed a growing interest in studying interaction designs that support households to 'shift' energy usage to times when it is sustainably favourable. In this paper, we investigate shifting through a purposely provocative and scripted design, which challenges the idea that renewable electricity is an always-available resource for households to consume. To do so, we made electricity for washing laundry either free or not available. We conducted a detailed qualitative study with four families that experienced our intervention for a month. We present five themes that illustrate how families adapted, reflected, and formed new routines and expectations related to washing practices. We discuss the broader implications of combining scripting and provocation as a means to intervene, disrupt and understand energy consuming practices within the home.

In this paper, we present an exploratory study of hygge as a low-energy design vision for the smart home. Hygge is a Danish concept that embodies aesthetic experiences related to conviviality, often shaped by orchestrating atmospheres through low-level lighting. To explore this vision, we probe two Australian households that already live with smart home lighting technology. We report on household reflections of embedding hygge into everyday life. We conclude by outlining future directions for exploring desirable and sus¬tainable smart home visions.

People increasingly interact with social media or other apps on their smartphones while driving car. This is naturally a major safety concern, and it remains unclear how to avoid or limit such interaction. We investigate this problem through human activity recognition (HAR) where we developed a system called IRIS, which collects smartwatch accelerometer data and analyses the data through machine learning and predicts if the data origins from a driver or a passenger. We report from a field experiment with 24 participants acting as drivers or passengers where we achieved an overall prediction accuracy of 87%. We further found that various road segments had less effect on the accuracy than anticipated, but we also found that passenger tasks had a negative effect on recognition accuracy. We discuss several implications from findings.

Research has shown that desirable designs shape the use and experiences people have when interacting with technology. Nevertheless, how desirability influences energy consumption is often overlooked, particularly in HCI studies evaluating the sustainability benefits of smart home technology. In this paper, we present a qualitative study with 23 Australian households who reflect on their experiences of living with smart home devices. Drawing on Nelson and Stolterman's concept of desiderata we develop a typology of householders' desires for the smart home and their energy implications. We structure these desires as three smart home personas: the helper, optimiser and hedonist, which align with desiderata's three approaches to desire (reason, ethics and aesthetics). We use these insights to discuss how desirability can be used within HCI for steering design of the smart home towards sustainability.

Ride-sharing can potentially address transportation challenges such as traffic congestion and air pollution by letting drivers share their cars unused capacity with a number of passengers. However, even though multiple ride-sharing services exist and HCI research has investigated various aspects of their use, we still have limited knowledge on how passengers use ride-sharing services to plan their trips. In this paper, we study how passengers use existing services to support the activity of planning a trip. We report from a qualitative study where we participated in 5 rides and conducted interviews with 19 passengers about their use and opinions towards ride-sharing services. We found that planning a ride involves comparing individual preferences across a number of services which enabled participants to support finding a trip and handle challenges such as privacy and trust. Further, we discuss these findings and their implications for future HCI research in ride-sharing.

Shifting is an energy-conserving interaction strategy for moving energy consumption to times where it is sustainably favorable. This interaction strategy is attracting increasing interest within sustainable HCI studies. While most of these consider how interactive technology can change household behavior, only a few report on how shifting is experienced in everyday life when assisted by automation. In this study, we investigate an interactive technology that assists households to shift electricity consumption to times when electricity is cheap or more sustainable. Our study was conducted as a long-term field deployment for 6--18 months with eight households, each living with an interactive prototype that shifts running times for a heat pump within user-defined boundaries. Our findings show that managing heat pumps toward assisted shifting was well-received by all households because it was a convenient way to shift electricity consumption. Shifting electricity use facilitated price savings of 6.8–16.9%. Nevertheless, our findings also reveal a conflict between the system design, and how householders actually interact with their heating system and experience assisted shifting. Based on the eight households’ experiences, we present three overall themes of convenience, control, and complexity that each describes different aspects of long-term real-life use of automatic technology assisting households to shift electricity use. We discuss the broader implications of these findings and the role of design and future sustainability technology in everyday life.

Recently within HCI, design approaches have appeared, which deviate from traditional ones. Among them critical design introduces deliberate provocations in order to challenge established perceptions and practices. We have engaged ourselves with this design approach out of interest in understanding how to use provocation in research through design. Towards this end, we report on a field study with four families that used an aesthetically, functionally and conceptually provocative future probe. The purpose of the probe was to challenge existing energy consuming practices through provocation and make its users reflect on them. The paper describes how all three provocative aspects were addressed, and our findings demonstrate how they were experienced in the real world, and how they impacted our research through design approach. We conclude by presenting reflections on how to design provocations, and reflections on the impact of provocations for research through design in general.

There is a growing interest in HCI research to explore cross-device interaction, giving rise to an interest in different approaches facilitating interaction between handheld devices and large displays. Contributing to this, we have investigated the use of four existing approaches combining touch and mid-air gestures, pinching, swiping, swinging and flicking. We look specifically at their relative efficiency, effectiveness and accuracy in bi-directional interaction between a smartphone and large display in a point-click context. We report findings from two user studies, which show that swiping is both most effective, fastest and most accurate, closely followed by swinging. What these two approaches have in common is the ability to keep the pointer steady on the large display, unaffected by concurrent gestures or body movements used to complete the interaction, suggesting that this is an important factor for designing effective cross-device interaction with large displays.

The amount of interactive digital technology in cars is increasing rapidly, and many new cars are shipped with connectivity. As a result, a new platform has emerged that holds potentials to facilitate many new and different interactions, both inside and outside the car. Within the area of HCI for cars, the focus has predominantly been on interactions with in-vehicle systems and applications of technology that is enabled through connectivity. However, we still lack in-depth empirical studies that provide details of the connected car, its use, opinions towards it, and how it integrates into people's everyday lives. We report from a qualitative study of 13 households with connected electric cars. We present our findings in 3 themes of interaction through connectivity, updating and upgrading car software, and security and privacy. We further discuss our findings in 3 themes that might inform and inspire further mobile HCI research with the connected car.

Recently a number of studies appeared that operationalised coolness and explored its relation to digital products. Literature suggests that perceived coolness is another factor of user experience, and this adds to an existing explosion of dimensions related to aesthetics, hedonic quality, pragmatic quality, attractiveness, etc. A critical challenge highlighted in prior research is to study the relationships among those factors and so far, no studies have empirically examined the relationship between coolness and other established user experience factors. In this paper, we address this challenge by presenting two studies one that focuses on factors from two cool questionnaires, and one that compares them against existing User eXperience (UX) factors. Our findings show that factors from the two cool questionnaires converge and they also converge to existing, established UX factors. Thus, 11 distinct cool and UX factors converge into 5 for the case of mobile devices. Our findings are important for researchers, as we demonstrate through a validated model that coolness is part of UX research, as well as for practitioners, by developing a questionnaire that can reliably measure both perceived inner and outer coolness as well as the overall coolness judgement based on 5 factors and 21 items.

Cross-device interaction provides new and interesting ways of interacting with technology as people have access to a growing number of mobile devices. In different social situations with more people, such cross-device interaction also enables different kinds of collaboration through the devices. In this paper, we explore collaboration and interaction between children during cross-device image exploration. We developed a collocated cross-device application called PinchPan that enables photo exploration and panning through pinching. We studied PinchPan with 22 children who used it in pairs to find different characters in various images. We found that the children adopted a number of different approaches for collaboration in cross-device interaction, and that panning constitutes a challenge for the image exploration.

Discovering activities in the city around you can be difficult with traditional search engines unless you know what you are looking for. Searching for inspiration on things to do requires a more open-ended and explorative approach. We introduce transitory search as a dynamic way of uncovering information about activities in the city around you that allows the user to start from a vague idea of what they are interested in, and iteratively modify their search using slider continuums to discover best-fit results. We present the design of a smartphone app exemplifying the idea of transitory search and give results from a lab evaluation and a 4-week field deployment involving 15 people in two different cities. Our findings indicate that transitory search on a mobile device both supports discovering activities in the city and more interestingly helps users reflect on and shape their preferences in situ. We also found that ambiguous slider continuums work well as people happily form and refine individual interpretations of them.

Coolness has recently started to be explored as a design goal for interactive products from practitioners as well as researchers within human–computer interaction (HCI), but there is still a need to further operationalise the concept and explore how we can measure it. Our contribution in this paper is the COOL questionnaire. We based the creation of the questionnaire on literature suggesting that perceived coolness is decomposed to outer cool (the style of a product) and inner cool (the personality characteristics assigned to it). In this paper, we focused on inner cool, and we identified 11 inner cool characteristics. These were used to create an initial pool of question items and 2236 participants were asked to assess 16 mobile devices. By performing exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses, we identified three factors that can measure the perceived inner coolness of interactive products: desirability, rebelliousness and usability. These factors and their underlying 16 question items comprise the COOL questionnaire. The whole process of creating the questionnaire is presented in detail in this paper and we conclude by discussing our work against related work on coolness and HCI.

Over the past decade we have seen an increased awareness about domestic energy consumption and a growing focus on eco-feedback displays. In this paper we explore the concept of providing forecasts in such displays as a supplement to information about past usage. Our prototype, eForecast, extends the display of past electricity usage with forecasts about expected usage, electricity price, availability of wind power, and expected demand drops and peaks. Building on previous eco-feedback display research, our approach specifically enables people to use electricity at more opportune times -- when it is cheap, green, or when there is an abundance of capacity. We evaluated eForecast in real world use in three domestic households for 22 weeks, where we explored potentials and limitations of forecasting for shifting electricity consumption. In this way, families were able to act in a more sustainable way -- without necessarily reducing the amount of electricity consumed.

Finding ways to help people quit smoking is a high priority in health behavior change research. Recent HCI studies involving technologies using specific quitting techniques such as social support and SMS messaging to help people quit have reported some success. Early studies using computer generated print material report significant success of tailored versus non-tailored material, however, there is limited understanding on what aspects of digitally delivered quitting assistance should be tailored and how. To address this, we have conducted an empirical investigation with smokers to identify perceived importance of different types of help when quitting and the potential role of technology in providing such help. We found that people are highly individual in their approach to quitting and the kind of help they regard as relevant to their situation. Our contribution is a collection of empirically derived themes for tailoring smoking cessation apps to individual quitting needs.

Implantable cardioverter-defibrillator (ICD) patients have increased safety when connected to remote monitoring as ICD problems and issues are instantly discovered compared to patients without a monitor. While remote monitoring is intrusive in the domestic environment, little HCI research has investigated how people live and interact with such monitoring technologies. We conducted a study with 19 ICD patients and their spouses using diaries and interviews. Our findings illustrate that our participants were satisfied with the monitoring despite the fact that they had almost no knowledge of the data collected and they lacked feedback from the monitor on transmission and operation. Based on our findings, we describe a safety paradox for remote monitoring as participants experienced less safety while being safer, and identify privacy and surveillance concerns in the unequal monitoring of ICD patients.

Recent research has explored the role technology might play in future kitchens, including virtually dining together, recipe sharing, augmented kitchen furniture, reactive cooking utensils and gestural interaction. When people come together in a kitchen to cook it is about more than just production of sustenance -- it is about being together, helping each other, exchanging stories, and contributing to the gradual emergence of a shared meal. In this paper we present a digital ethnography of how people coordinate and cooperate in their kitchens when cooking together for the purpose of inspiring the design of social natural user interactions for technologies in the kitchen. The study is based on 61 YouTube videos of people cooking together analyzed using the frameworks of proxemics and F-formations. Our findings unfold and illustrate relationships between people's spatial organization, their cooking activities and physical kitchen layouts. Based on these we discuss the kitchen as a design space and particularly the opportunities for social natural user interaction design.

We present the design and evaluation of a smartphone app, QuittyLink, designed to help smokers reduce or stop smoking. Smoking cigarettes is a serious health risk and people who wish to quit often struggle to do so. It is well known that the most effective method of assisting smoking cessation is personal face-to-face counseling. However, this approach is only used by very few people wishing to quit for reasons such as inconvenience and personal shyness. In response to this we have created an app that provides personal counseling to users on their smartphone. The counseling content is authored by smoking cessation experts and is based on the user's personal data and recent actual smoking behaviors collected through the smartphone. We deployed the QuittyLink app with people in their everyday lives to study how personal counseling on mobile phones would influence their smoking behaviors. We found that both the personal counseling and the ability to visualize and reflect on their own self-tracked smoking behaviors helped them form strategies to improve their ability to quit.

Traditional video communication systems offer a very limited experience of eye contact due to the offset between cameras and the screen. In response, we present EyeGaze, which uses multiple Kinect cameras to generate a 3D model of the user, and then renders a virtual camera angle giving the user an experience of eye contact. As a novel approach, we use concepts from KinectFusion, such as a volumetric voxel data representation and GPU accelerated ray tracing for viewpoint rendering. This achieves detail from a noisy source, and allows the real-time video output to be a composite of old and new data. We frame our work in literature on eye contact and previous approaches to supporting it over video. We then describe EyeGaze, and an empirical study comparing it with communication face-to-face or over traditional video. The study shows that while face-to-face is still superior, EyeGaze has added value over traditional video in terms of eye contact, involvement, turn-taking and co-presence.

Recent years have seen an increased research interest in multi-device interactions and digital ecosystems. This research addresses new opportunities and challenges when users are not simply interacting with one system or device at a time, but orchestrate ensembles of them as a larger whole. One of these challenges is to understand what principles of interaction work well for what, and to create such knowledge in a form that can inform design. Our contribution to this research is a framework of interaction principles for digital ecosystems, which can be used to analyze and understand existing systems and design new ones. The 4C framework provides new insights over existing frameworks and theory by focusing specifically on explaining the interactions taking place within digital ecosystems. We demonstrate this value through two examples of the framework in use, firstly for understanding an existing digital ecosystem, and secondly for generating ideas and discussion when designing a new one.

Evaluation is considered one of the major cornerstones of human-computer interaction (HCI). During the last decade, several studies have discussed pros and cons of lab and field evaluations. Based on these discussions, we conduct a review to explore the past decade of mobile HCI research on field and lab evaluation, investigating responses in the literature to the "is it worth the hassle?" paper from 2004. We find that while our knowledge and experience with both lab and field studies have grown considerably, there is still no definite answer to the lab versus field question. In response we suggest that the real question is not if -- but when and how -- to go into the field. In response we suggest moving beyond usability evaluations, and to engage with field studies that are truly in-the-wild, and longitudinal.

Mobile HCI research has started to investigate multi-device interaction as we often have more devices at our immediate disposal. We present an application called JuxtaPinch that allows users to share photos while being collocated using several different devices, i.e. mobile phones and tablets, at the same time. JuxtaPinch use pinching to connect devices and it enables flexible physical positioning of devices and supports partial viewing of photos. Our evaluation showed that JuxtaPinch enabled participants to experience their own familiar photos in new ways known as defamiliarization. It further enabled participants to engage jointly in playful interaction with the photos and with each other. However, we also found that multiple device collocated photo sharing challenges aspects of synchronization and coordination.

We have developed an application called JuxtaPinch that allows users to share photos on multiple devices, i.e. mobile phones and tablets, while being collocated. JuxtaPinch employs simple and intuitive interaction techniques, e.g. pinching to connect devices, and it enables flexible physical positioning of devices and supports partial photo viewing. JuxtaPinch further enables users to use their own devices and access photos stored on own devices. In the Interactivity session, audience members can explore and view photos with friends and colleagues using different devices and experience defamiliarization and playful interaction with the photos -- aspects that we have uncovered during lab and field studies of JuxtaPinch.

When people interact with digital artefacts they perceive their pragmatic and hedonic qualities. In the case of interacting with mobile devices and applications, users seek utility as they try to satisfy certain needs, but at the same time they have certain feelings and emotions when, for example, they feel attached to their personal phone and/or trust its brand. Due to this strong relation between users and mobile devices a significant problem occurs when researchers want to evaluate the user experience of a mobile application in laboratory settings: the selection of an appropriate mobile device. Towards this end, this paper aims to unveil the effect of perceived hedonic quality of a mobile device on the user experience evaluation results of an application. Our results show that the perceived hedonic quality of a mobile device significantly affected the perceived pragmatic quality of the application, but not the hedonic one.

Given the wide adoption of smartphones, an interesting debate is taking place regarding their optimal screen size and specifically whether possible portability issues counterbalance the obvious benefits of a larger screen. Moreover, the lack of scientific evidence about the concrete impact of mobile phones' screen size on usability raises questions both to practitioners and researchers. In this paper, we investigate the impact of a mobile phone's screen size on users' effectiveness, efficiency and perceived usability as measured using System Usability Scale (SUS). An experiment was conducted with 60 participants, which interacted with the same information seeking application on three different devices of the same brand that differed on their screen size. A significant effect of screen size on efficiency was derived, leading to an important finding that users who interact with larger than 4.3in screens are more efficient during information seeking tasks.

Recent focus on sustainability has made consumers more aware of our joint responsibility for conserving energy resources such as electricity. However, reducing electricity use can be difficult with only a meter and a monthly or annual electricity bill. With the emergence of new power meters units, information on electricity consumption is now available digitally and wirelessly. This enables the design and deployment of a new class of persuasive systems giving consumers insight into their use of energy resources and means for reducing it. In this paper, we explore the design and use of one such system, Power Advisor, promoting electricity conservation through tailored information on a mobile phone or tablet. The use of the system in 10 households was studied over 7 weeks. Findings provide insight into peoples awareness of electricity consumption in their home and how this may be influenced through design.

Many efforts to improve the interplay between usability evaluation and software development rely either on better methods for conducting usability evaluations or on better formats for presenting evaluation results in ways that are useful for software designers and developers. Both of these approaches depend on a complete division of work between developers and evaluators. This article takes a different approach by exploring whether software developers and designers can be trained to conduct their own usability evaluations. The article is based on an empirical study where 36 teams with a total of 234 first-year university students on software development and design educations were trained through an introductory course in user-based website usability testing that was taught in 40 h. They used the techniques from this course for planning, conducting, and interpreting the results of a usability evaluation of an interactive website. They gained good competence in conducting the evaluation, defining user tasks and producing a usability report, while they were less successful in acquiring skills for identifying and describing usability problems.

Advance warning systems constitute a class of in-vehicle systems that could influence and improve driving in the future, e.g. by warning of accidents or slippery roads. However, the effects of advance warning systems are still poorly understood and investigated. In this paper, we report from an experiment in a controlled driving situation where we investigate how such advance warnings affect driver behavior and attention. Our results showed that the advance warnings overall had a limited effect on the speed of the drivers, although they had a positive effect for some road conditions especially for slippery road conditions. Furthermore, our subjects had a significantly higher number of eye glances. In particular, they glanced at the system when warnings were issued.

Global Positioning System (GPS) navigation systems were amongst the top selling consumer technologies in 2008 and research has indicated that such technologies could affect driving behaviour. In this paper, we study how different output configurations (audio, visual and audio-visual) of a GPS system affect driving behaviour and performance. We conducted field experiments in real traffic with 30 subjects. Our results illustrated that visual output not only causes a substantial amount of eye glances, but also led to a decrease in driving performance. Adding audio output decreased the number of eye glances, but we found no significant effects on driving performance. Although the audio configuration implied much fewer eye glances and improved driving performance, several participants expressed preference for the audio/visual output.

Car drivers are nowadays offered a wide array of in-vehicle systems i.e. route guidance systems, climate controls, music players. Such in-vehicle systems often require the driver's visual attention, but visual workload has shown significant less eyes-on-the-road time and affects driving performance. In this paper, we illustrate and compare three different interaction techniques for in-vehicle systems. We refer to them as tactile, touch, and gesture interaction. The focus of the techniques is the effects on drivers while driving cars. We evaluated the interaction techniques with 16 subjects in two settings. Our results showed that gesture interaction has a significant effect on the number of driver eye glances especially eye fixations of more seconds. However, gesture interaction still required rapid eye glances for hand/eye coordination. On the other hand, touch interaction leads to fast and efficient task completion while tactile interaction seemed inferior to the two other interaction techniques.

Increased complexity of organizations and emerging technologies poses new and difficult challenges for the evaluation of software systems. Several years of research have proven that usability evaluations are invaluable tools for ensuring the quality of software technologies, but the increased complexity of technology requires new ways of understanding and evaluating the quality of software systems. This article explores limitations, challenges, and opportunities for studying mobile technologies “in use, in situ;” in laboratories (in vitro); and in controlled high-fidelity simulations of the real world. The latter condition is called in sitro. This report comes from 2 different case studies of evaluating the usability of mobile systems within these 3 different conditions. Results show that it is possible to recreate and simulate significant elements of intended future use situations in laboratory settings and thereby increase the level of realism and maintain a high level of control. In fact, the in sitro condition was able to identify most of the same usability problems as found in the other conditions. However, the in situ evaluation proved to provide a level of realism that is difficult to achieve in laboratory environments.

Mediating intimacy between children and their parents is still limited investigated and at the same time, we find that, emerging technologies are about to change and affect the way we interact with each other. In this paper, we report from an empirical study where we investigated the social interaction phenomena that unfold between children and their parents. We used cultural probes and contextual interviews to investigate the intimate acts between children and parents in three families. Our findings show that the intimate act between children and parents share a number of similarities with other types of intimate relations such as strong-tie intimacy (couples cohabiting). However, we also identified several issues of intimacy unique to the special relation between children and their parents. These unique acts of intimacy propose challenges when designing technologies for mediated intimacy in families.

On the basis of a longitudinal field study of domestic communication, we report some essential constituents of the user experience of awareness of others who are distant in space or time, i.e. presence-in-absence.We discuss presence-in-absence in terms of its social (Contact) and informational (Content) facets, and the circumstances of the experience (Context).The field evaluation of a prototype, 'The Cube', designed to support presence-in-absence, threw up issues in the interrelationships between contact, content and context; issues that the designers of similar social artifacts will need to address.

Constructive interaction provides natural thinking-aloud as test subjects collaborate to solve tasks. Since children may face difficulties in following instructions for a standard think-aloud test, constructive interaction has been suggested as evaluation method when conducting usability testing with children. However, the relationship between think-aloud and constructive interaction is still poorly understood.We present an experiment that compares think-aloud and constructive interaction in usability testing. The experiment involves 60 children with three setups where children apply think-aloud, and constructive interaction in acquainted and non-acquainted pairs. Our results showed only minor significant differences between the setups, but the pairing of the children had impact on identification of usability problems as acquainted dyads identified more problems both in total and of the most severe than non-acquainted dyads and individual testers. Finally, the acquainted pairs reported that they had to put less effort into the testing than the think-aloud and non-acquainted children.

Research methods have been objects of discussions for decades and defining research methods is still a quite considerable challenge. However, it is important to understand research methods in different disciplines as it informs us on future directions and influences on the discipline.We conduct a survey of research methods in paper publications. 105 papers on children's technology design are classified on a two-dimensional matrix on research method and purpose. Our results show a strong focus on engineering of products as applied research and on evaluation of developed products in the field or in the lab. Also, we find that much research is conducted in natural setting environments with strong focus on field studies.