Heavy penetration of mobile devices in rural areas enables access to information services to low-literate users. While connectivity solves a major issue, concepts such as browsing and searching are not intuitive to such users. This paper presents the design of a multimodal (speech+icons) voice browser for low-literate users in rural India. We conducted a field study to determine their current communication styles and preferences. Based on this, we designed three browsers, each influenced by a specific way of communicating -- persona based roles, storytelling and direct interaction. The prototypes were evaluated in a task-based study with 62 low-literate users and were compared with a baseline Interactive Voice Response (IVR) browser. Our results suggest that there is clear acceptance and understanding of the necessary concepts if the browser is designed using the design constructs of persona based roles and storytelling.

Pinching and spreading gestures are prevalent in mobile applications today, but these gestures have not yet been studied extensively. We conducted an exploratory study of pinch and spread gestures with seated participants on a phone and a tablet device. We found device orientation did not have a significant effect on gesture performance, most pinch and spread tasks were completed in a single action, and they were executed in 0.9-1.2 seconds. We also report how participants chose to sit with the mobile device, variations in gesture execution method, and the effect of varying target width and gesture size. Our task execution times for different gesture distances and precision levels display a surprisingly good fit to a simple Fitts's Law model. We conclude with recommendations for future studies.

In this workshop, we intend to explore within the HCI community the importance of fashion in the IT industry. We will explore the meaning of fashion and how fashion and sustainability could and might interplay in the IT industry. Participants in the workshop will collaborate in a practical exercise to act as a stimulus for thought concerning how the notion of fashion affects people's behaviors and attitudes toward digital consumption. Participants will also form different groups and share their own personal experience, behavioral changes, as well as insights related to sustainability and fashion. The outcomes of the workshop will include 1) a collection of exemplars and patterns relevant to fashion related to digital devices and technology services; 2) the identification and description of the characteristics of fashion in the digital technology domain; 3) a summary of the discussion on how interaction designers and researchers can use fashion as a positive force in sustainable HCI.

As a starting point, this paper considers a compelling idea concerning fashion and sustainable HCI---rather than attempt to thwart fashion, or exhort people not to engage in fashion-related behavior, instead, based on a deeper understanding of the complexity of fashion, utilize this concept to design products and services so as to resonate with those dimensions of fashion that are most compatible with sustainability. Our ultimate vision is to provide mechanisms to allow designers to use fashion as a positive force for sustainable design, especially in the context of HCI and interaction design. As a step along the path between this starting point and our ultimate vision, this paper describes some related literature and thoughts about methods, reports on a collection of interviews and emergent insights, and several general design implications which link fashion positively to sustainable practices and futures. Moreover, we hope to inspire others to contribute to this idea and its potential for sustainable HCI.

In this study, we explore the role of age and fluid intelligence on the behavior of people looking for information in a real-world search space. Analyses of mouse moves, clicks, and eye movements provide a window into possible differences in both task strategy and performance, and allow us to begin to separate the influence of age from the correlated but isolable influence of cognitive ability. We found little evidence of differences in strategy between younger and older participants matched on fluid intelligence. Both performance and strategy differences were found between older participants having higher versus lower fluid intelligence, however, suggesting that cognitive factors, rather than age per se, exert the dominant influence. This underscores the importance of measuring and controlling for cognitive abilities in studies involving older adults.

Visual representations are common in communicating about artifacts such as computer programs, software architectures, and business rules. Yet, generally speaking, these representations seem much harder to learn and to use than many of the representations in other domains. Moody [1] has pointed this out and proposed a set of principles for visual representations based on a wide review of relevant literature in cognitive psychology and software engineering. The real test of this framework is to use it. In this paper, we apply the principles set forth in Moody to examine and improve a proposed representation for business rules and business decisions.

As digital communities grow in size their feature sets also grow with them. Different users have different experiences with the same tools and communities. Enterprises and other organizations seeking to leverage these communities need a straightforward way to analyze and compare a variety of salient attributes of these communities. We describe a taxonomy and tool for crowd-sourcing user based evaluations of enterprise relevant attributes of digital communities and present the results of a small scale study on its usefulness and stability across multiple raters.

Designers often have no access to individuals who use screen reading software, and may have little understanding of how their design choices impact these users. We explore here whether cog-nitive models of auditory interaction could provide insight into screen reader usability. By comparing human data with a tool-generated model of a practiced task performed using a screen reader, we identify several requirements for such models and tools. Most important is the need to represent parallel execution of hearing with thinking and acting. Rules for placement of cogni-tive operators that were developed for visual user interfaces may not be applicable in the auditory domain. Other mismatches be-tween the data and the model were attributed to the extremely fast listening rate and differences between the typing patterns of screen reader usage and the model's assumptions. This work in-forms the development of more accurate models of auditory inter-action. Tools incorporating such models could help designers create user interfaces that are well tuned for screen reader users, without the need for modeling expertise.

In learning, people develop new cognitive structures by metaphorically extending old ones. The metaphors spontaneously generated by new users will predict the ease with which they can master a computer system. Systems which through their interface suggest inefficacious metaphors will accordingly be more difficult to learn and to that extent unacceptable.

Article Free Access Share on The computer as an active communication medium Author: John C. Thomas IBM T. J. Watson Research Center, Yorktown Heights, New York IBM T. J. Watson Research Center, Yorktown Heights, New YorkView Profile Authors Info & Claims ACL '80: Proceedings of the 18th annual meeting on Association for Computational LinguisticsJune 1980 Pages 83–86https://doi.org/10.3115/981436.981462Online:19 June 1980Publication History 0citation273DownloadsMetricsTotal Citations0Total Downloads273Last 12 Months104Last 6 weeks18 Get Citation AlertsNew Citation Alert added!This alert has been successfully added and will be sent to:You will be notified whenever a record that you have chosen has been cited.To manage your alert preferences, click on the button below.Manage my AlertsNew Citation Alert!Please log in to your account Save to BinderSave to BinderCreate a New BinderNameCancelCreateExport CitationPublisher SiteeReaderPDF