This paper explores the communication of emotion through shape using Morph-UX, a web-based application for emotive form design which uses physiological features correlated with emotional experience as input to control objects attributes in real-time. Centered on the body, our approach aims to provide visual feedback as to how bodily sensations associated with the expression of emotions can alter, transform and modulate shapes. Preliminary results from a 30-participant user study show that shapes generated using Morph-UX accurately convey users' experienced emotional valence and arousal. We describe the design and development of Morph-UX and highlight how embodied shapes can be used to communicate affect, ideas and intentions. Implications for further exploration of physiological signals as a design material are also discussed.

Practitioners in many fields of human-computer interaction are now using physiological data to measure different aspects of user experience. The dynamic nature of physiological data offers a continuous window to the users and allows a better understanding of their experience while interacting with a system. However, in order to be truly informative, physiological signals need to be closely linked to users’ behaviors and interaction states. This paper presents an analysis method that provides a direct visual interpretation of users’ physiological signals when interacting with an interface. The proposed physiological heatmap tool uses eyetracking data along with physiological signals to identify regions where users are experiencing different emotional and cognitive states with a higher frequency. The method was evaluated in an experiment with 44 participants. Results show that physiological heatmaps are able to identify emotionally significant regions within an interface better than standard gaze heatmaps. Applications of the method to different fields of HCI research are also discussed.

In this paper, we present an off-the-shelf UX evaluation tool which contextualizes users' physiological and behavioral signals while interacting with a system. The proposed tool triangulates users' gaze data with inferred users' cognitive and emotional states to produce user experience (UX) heatmaps, which show where users were looking when they experienced specific cognitive and emotional states. Results show that for a given cognitive state (i.e., cognitive load), the proposed UX heatmap was able to effectively highlight the areas where users experienced different levels of cognitive load on an interface. The proposed tool enables the visual analysis of users' various emotional and cognitive states for specific areas on a given interface, and also to compare users' states across multiple interfaces, which should be useful for both UX researchers and practitioners.

The need for intelligent HCI has been reinforced by the increasing numbers of human-centered applications in our daily life. However, in order to respond adequately, intelligent applications must first interpret users’ actions. Identifying the context in which users’ interactions occur is an important step toward automatic interpretation of behavior. In order to address a part of this context-sensing problem, we propose a generic and application-independent framework for activity recognition of users interacting with a computer interface. Our approach uses Layered Hidden Markov Models (LHMM) and is based on eye-gaze movements along with keyboard and mouse interactions. The main contribution of the proposed framework is the ability to relate users’ interactions to a task model in variant applications and for different monitoring purposes. Experimental results from two user studies show that our activity recognition technique is able to achieve good predictive accuracy with a relatively small amount of training data.

This paper presents a task selection model for personalised educational instruction. The proposed model is based on the student expertise level and it takes into account performance and mental load in order to adapt task selection. The article also discusses distinctions between our approach and related works.