Board gaming is a popular hobby that increasingly features the inclusion of technology, yet little research has sought to understand how board game player experience is impacted by digital augmentation or to inform the design of new technology-enhanced games. We present a mixed-methods study exploring how the presence of music and sound effects impacts the player experience of a board game. We found that the soundtrack increased the enjoyment and tension experienced by players during game play. We also found that a soundtrack provided atmosphere surrounding the gaming experience, though players did not necessarily experience this as enhancing the world-building capabilities of the game. We discuss how our findings can inform the design of new games and soundtracks as well as future research into board game player experience.

People integrate digital services into their day-to-day lives, often with the assumption that they will always be available. What happens when these services close down? The introduction of services might be carefully planned, but their closure may not benefit from the same degree of consideration. A more developed understanding of the effects of closures might make it possible to minimize negative consequences for users. This paper builds on sustainability, digital memories, and collaborative-work research through an empirical investigation of service closure. Fifty-five participants completed a questionnaire that solicited experiences of service closure and attitudes toward prospective closure. Through a qualitative analysis of participant responses, we synthesized six themes that reflected the practical and emotional effects of service closure on people: disempowerment, disconnection, loss of capability, trust, time and effort, and notice periods. We make suggestions for ways that service features related to these themes might be managed during closure, but also identify less tractable challenges: as part of this investigation, we introduce and develop the concept of service patinas to describe the important but entirely service-bound data that contextualize digital artefacts.

Earables/hearables (ear-worn devices) are on the rise as next-generation wearables which are capable of streaming audio, modifying soundscapes, and collecting body vitals. This paper introduces a novel concept of an earable device that can provide thermal (hot and cold) haptic cues at multiple areas around the ear. The concept with discrete thermal encoding can help the hearing and visually impaired individuals to obtain directional and other notifications from mobile and IoT devices. Embedding thermal haptic feedback into an earable form factor have a better edge in terms of privacy of notifications when compared to audio, visual, and vibrohaptic modalities. We conducted a pilot study using a proof-of-concept prototype and confirmed the feasibility of the concept.

The use of emoji in digital communication can convey a wealth of emotions and concepts that otherwise would take many words to express. Emoji have become a popular form of communication, with researchers claiming emoji represent a type of "ubiquitous language" that can span different languages. In this paper however, we explore how emoji are also used in highly personalised and purposefully secretive ways. We show that emoji are repurposed for something other than their "intended" use between close partners, family members and friends. We present the range of reasons why certain emoji get chosen, including the concept of "emoji affordance" and explore why repurposing occurs. Normally used for speed, some emoji are instead used to convey intimate and personal sentiments that, for many reasons, their users cannot express in words. We discuss how this form of repurposing must be considered in tasks such as emoji-based sentiment analysis.

Flatland was an immersive “in-the-wild” experimental theater and technology project, undertaken with the goal of developing systems that could assist “real-world” pedestrian navigation for both vision-impaired (VI) and sighted individuals, while also exploring inclusive and equivalent cultural experiences for VI and sighted audiences. A novel shape-changing handheld haptic navigation device, the “Animotus,” was developed. The device has the ability to modify its form in the user's grasp to communicate heading and proximity to navigational targets. Flatland provided a unique opportunity to comparatively study the use of novel navigation devices with a large group of individuals (79 sighted, 15 VI) who were primarily attending a theater production rather than an experimental study. In this paper, we present our findings on comparing the navigation performance (measured in terms of efficiency, average pace, and time facing targets) and opinions of VI and sighted users of the Animotus as they negotiated the 112 m2production environment. Differences in navigation performance were nonsignificant across VI and sighted individuals and a similar range of opinions on device function and engagement spanned both groups. We believe more structured device familiarization, particularly for VI users, could improve performance and incorrect technology expectations (such as obstacle avoidance capability), which influenced overall opinion. This paper is intended to aid the development of future inclusive technologies and cultural experiences.

Immersive theatre is a growing trend within theatre entertainment: audience members can now wander around performances and choose how the story unfolds in front of them. Technology can be used to create novel, multi-modal experiences for audiences in these performances; but when the rules of such an experience are ill-defined, how do users react to this technology? We present an evaluation of 25 performances of an immersive, in the dark performance. Issues of control can arise in situations where technology becomes an important part of such a performance. Participants take and relinquish control in three key areas: navigation, exploration and attention during the performance, and this affects their perception of both technology and the piece itself. We discuss how technology can play a positive role in immersive theatre and other cultural settings, yet its use must be carefully choreographed to ensure the audience experience matches the intended goal.

The Internet of Things is connecting an ever-increasing number of devices. These devices often require access to personal information, but their meagre user interfaces usually do not permit traditional modes of authentication. On such devices, one-time pairing codes are often used instead. This pairing process can involve transcribing randomly generated alphanumeric codes, which can be frustrating, slow and error-prone. In this paper, we present an improved pairing method that uses sets of English words instead of random strings. The word method, although longer in terms of character length, allows users to pair devices more quickly, whilst still maintaining the complexity necessary for secure interactions.

Link-shortening services save space and make the manual entry of URLs less onerous. Short links are often included on printed materials so that people using mobile devices can quickly enter URLs. Although mobile transcription is a common use-case, link-shortening services generate output that is poorly suited to entry on mobile devices: links often contain numbers and capital letters that require time consuming mode switches on touch screen keyboards. With the aid of computational modeling, we identified problems with the output of a link-shortening service, bit.ly. Based on the results of this modeling, we hypothesized that longer links that are optimized for input on mobile keyboards would improve link entry speeds compared to shorter links that required keyboard mode switches. We conducted a human performance study that confirmed this hypothesis. Finally, we applied our method to a selection of different non-word mobile data-entry tasks. This work illustrates the need for service design to fit the constraints of the devices people use to consume services.

Number entry is a mundane and error-prone task. To find errors, users often rely on visual checks to compare the differences between their instructions and the numbers they have actually input, a task that is difficult for users to do accurately. We therefore propose the use of number-based graphical representations (GRs) as a complement to conventional numeric representations (NR) to enhance visual checks, so users can examine both GRs and NRs to detect errors. We conducted two experiments to explore the issues raised. Experiment 1 examined the effects of GRs and NRs on representation difference detection (i.e. checking if two GRs or NRs are identical). The two representations had a comparative performance by time and error rate. In Experiment 2, we investigated the performance of GRs and NRs with number entry tasks. While extending the task time (increased by 38%), number entry with GRs resulted in significantly fewer errors than without GRs (decreased by 60%). Participants also had a high preference for number entry with GRs. Therefore, the proposed technique is promising for number entry error reduction, and that in safety critical applications improved safety can be achieved.

Number entry is a common task in many domains. In safety-critical environments such as air traffic control or on hospital wards, incorrect number entry can have serious harmful consequences. Research has investigated how interface designs can help prevent users from making number entry errors. In this paper, we present an experimental evaluation of two possible interface designs aimed at helping users detect number entry errors using the idea of a checksum: an additional (redundant) number that is related to the to-be-entered numbers in such a way that it is sufficient to verify the correctness of the checksum, as opposed to checking each of the entered numbers. The first interface requires users to check their own work with the help of the checksum; the second requires the user to enter the checksum along with the other numbers so that the system can do the checking. In each case, two numbers needed to be entered, while the third number served as a checksum. With the first interface, users caught only 36% of their errors. The second interface resulted in all errors being caught, but the need to enter the checksum increased entry time by 46%. When participants were allowed to choose between the two interfaces, they chose the second interface in only 12% of the cases. Although these results cannot be generalized to other specific contexts, the results illustrate the strengths and weaknesses of each way of using checksums to catch number entry errors. Hence our study can serve as a starting point for efforts to improve each method.