Haptic Experience Design (HaXD) is a rather young and rapidly evolving discipline, with numerous authoring tools and design approaches proposed in recent years. Despite these advances, the design process itself remains underexplored, particularly in terms of how design decisions evolve over iterative sessions. In this paper, we present an exploratory approach that enables haptic designers (hapticians) to visually reflect on the evolution of vibrotactile experiences (tactons) over time. Our approach captures and visualizes the progression of tactons during design sessions, which can even last hours. By making the evolution of designs explicit, our method can support hapticians in identifying key design steps and iterations, which is particularly valuable in complex or collaborative workflows. Ultimately, we envision that such visualizations can inform the development of authoring tools that integrate versioning and iterative reflection, thereby advancing both the practice and methodology of HaXD.

Dimensionality reduction (DR) reveals clusters and trends in multivariate data but often weakens the link between observed structures and the underlying attributes. Data glyphs can re-introduce attribute-level evidence directly in the projection, yet practical end-to-end tools that combine DR, glyph enrichment, and multiscale interaction remain limited. We present Glyphspace, a browser-based visual analytics system that integrates guided dataset import and preprocessing, multiple DR projections, linked multi-canvas comparison, histogram-based filtering, and multiscale inspection via semantic zoom and a Magic Lens. Our contribution is primarily one of integration and usability: Glyphspace packages established techniques into a cohesive, fully client-side workflow designed for rapid exploration and education without programming.

Octilinear maps are widely used in public transportation, transforming the underlying transit networks by simplifying their line trajectories and aligning them to a given grid structure. This schematization of the network is assumed to reduce cognitive load and thereby improve human navigational performance. Our study investigates this assumption by directly comparing route finding performance on octilinear maps versus geographically accurate maps. To further investigate the role of cognitive load, participants completed half of the route-finding tasks under time constraints, aiming to amplify any performance differences between the two types of maps. However, our results reveal no significant differences between octilinear and geographic maps in the performance metrics of response time, number of map interactions, and estimated travel time, as well as subjective cognitive load. Differences emerged only in route correctness and in favor of the geographic map. Our findings challenge the presumed advantages of octilinear schematization and suggest that map design could be more context-sensitive, tailored to specific applications, network characteristics, or user preferences.

Grasping is one of the most important factors of human evolution and even young children start to explore the world by dominantly using touch. However, current interaction technologies suffer from an imbalance between visual and haptic stimulation. Shape-changing interfaces are one line of research addressing this issue. Unfortunately, these systems are often very complex and difficult to replicate. This is not the case for Elastic Displays that have low mechanical complexity and utilize consumer hardware. Albeit their simple setup, neither off-the-shelf hardware for research purposes or instructions on how to assemble such systems are available. This hampers open science and the replication of research results. In this paper, we describe our experiences on constructing an Elastic Display. We present lessons learned from several field tests and the final requirements of the setup. Moreover, we introduce an open source documentation of the hardware assembly instructions, which integrates with a previously published open source software framework. With both hardware and software now being readily available, novel application concepts for Elastic Displays can be explored by a broad community.

The article deals with multiple skill barriers in digitalised industrial work environments. Overcoming them could help to reduce shortage of skilled workers in the manufacturing sector in Germany [4]. An empirical study aims to develop and evaluate suitable qualification tools and measures for the integration of people with skills barriers such as illiteracy, language barriers and lack of familiarity with digital technologies (digital immigrants) into industrial work processes.[10].

Virtual environments are well-researched in the HCI community. Many approaches such Cave Automatic Virtual Environments (CAVEs) and head-mounted displays require specialized hardware and are optimized for single users. Moreover, the focus on visualization neglects other sensory input we know from the real world such as odor or spatial sound, which only recently became a more prominent feature in consumer devices. Our research is focused on recording multiple sensorial media (mulsemedia) in the real world including rich visuals, spatial sound, and odors. We describe our technology stack to record and reproduce real world places in replicable immersive environments using standard equipment where possible. Consequently, we can support more realistic training simulations or create leisure environments for relaxation.

Aesthetic pleasure in viewing information visualizations can profoundly influence how the displayed data is perceived and memorized. Several instruments to measure aesthetics for visual communication have been proposed, but the influence of interaction with a visual display has not yet been investigated. In a user study, we explore how interaction with displayed data reflects on three measurement tools for aesthetics: a single slider, the BeauVis questionnaire, and the Aesthetic Pleasure in Design Scale. We could detect that specific items of the BeauVis scale (pleasing, appealing, likeable) are significantly influenced by whether users interacted with the presented static or interactive diagrams.

Creating innovative applications for novel interface technologies poses several challenges for both designers and developers. Rapid prototyping helps to examine concepts, check hypotheses, and acquire early user feedback. In this paper, we present ReFlex, a framework that provides rapid prototyping and development tools for Elastic Displays, and its application in the context of a student project developing a spatial controller for remote 3D navigation.

Elastic displays afford a natural stacking of information layers in their haptic interaction space. So far, research has focused on technical issues and interaction concepts by pushing and pulling the surface of such displays. We report a study with 24 participants that investigates the feasibility and limitations of interaction with 6 to 21 layers. We measured completion times and error rates for reaching and holding specific target layers and observed performed gestures. Our findings show that solution time increases with more layers while precision is maintained with a mean success rate of holding a layer of 70 %, even when using up to 21 layers. User experience measurements show that hedonic qualities of the interaction were rated higher than pragmatic qualities. Our investigation proves the general feasibility of using layer-based interaction with an elastic display and provides guidelines on the limitations.

In this poster paper we present a web user study about a customer dialogue system, in which participants assigned tickets based on an automatic classification to different departments and answered questions about the perceived classification performance. Completion times were significantly shorter when offering explanations on the classification process, while task success and trust in the interface did not depend on showing explanations or not. Based on the results, future studies should be confined to smaller scopes and investigate more techniques for explainable AI.

Currently, both understanding and developing interactive visual interfaces become ever more challenging, since different visual solutions exist that involve large interdisciplinary teams and deal with massive amounts of data, a wide range of interaction techniques, and domain-specific aspects. At the same time, traditional design methods become obsolete with more and more resources and knowledge that needs to be acquired. The proposed workshop provides a forum for discussing experimental and theoretical techniques, frameworks, and prototyping methods to design visual interfaces in different domains such as data visualization, tangible and embedded interaction, extended and mixed reality, multi-modal interfaces, and others.

Rigorous data science is interdisciplinary at its core. In order to make sense of high-dimensional data, data scientists need to enter into a dialogue with domain experts. We present Glyphboard, a visualization tool that aims to support this dialogue. Glyphboard is a zoomable user interface that combines well-known methods such as dimensionality reduction and glyph-based visualizations in a novel, seamless, and integrated tool. While the dimensionality reduction affords a quick overview over the data, glyph-based visualizations are able to show the most relevant dimensions in the data set at one glance. We contribute an open-source prototype of Glyphboard, a general exchange format for high-dimensional data, and a case study with nine data scientists and domain experts from four exemplary domains in order to evaluate how the different visualization and interaction features of Glyphboard are used.

Industrial applications can benefit considerably from the overwhelming amount of still growing resources such as websites, images, texts, and videos that the internet offers today. The resulting Big Data Problem does not only consist of handling this immense volume of data. Moreover, data needs to be processed, cleaned, and presented in a user-friendly, intuitive, and interactive way. This workshop addresses visualization and user interaction challenges posed by the four V's: Volume (huge data amounts in the range of tera and petabytes), Velocity (the speed in which data is created, processed, and analysed), Variety (the different heterogeneous data types, sources, and formats), and Veracity (authenticity and validity of data). Big Data driven interfaces combine suitable backend and frontend technologies as well as automatic and semi-automatic approaches in order to analyze data in various business contexts. An important aspect is human intervention in developing and training data-driven applications (human in the loop). Our focus is on Visual Big Data Interfaces in industrial contexts such as e-commerce, e-learning and business intelligence. We address interfaces for three important user groups: data scientists, data workers and end users.

With the internet, massively heterogeneous data sources need to be understood and classified to provide suitable services to users such as content observation, data exploration, e-commerce, or adaptive learning environments. The key to providing these services is applying machine learning (ML) in order to generate structures via clustering and classification. Due to the intricate processes involved in ML, visual tools are needed to support designing and evaluating the ML pipelines. In this contribution, we propose a comprehensive tool that facilitates the analysis and design of ML-based clustering algorithms using multiple visualization features such as semantic zoom, glyphs, and histograms.

Data Analysts have to deal with an ever-growing amount of data resources. One way to make sense of this data is to extract features and use clustering algorithms to group items according to a similarity measure. Algorithm developers are challenged when evaluating the performance of the algorithm since it is hard to identify features that influence the clustering. Moreover, many algorithms can be trained using a semi-supervised approach, where human users provide ground truth samples by manually grouping single items. Hence, visualization techniques are needed that help data analysts achieve their goal in evaluating Big data clustering algorithms. In this context, Multidimensional Scaling (MDS) has become a prominent visualization tool. In this paper, we propose a combination with glyphs that can provide a detailed view of specific features involved in MDS. In consequence, human users can understand, adjust, and ultimately improve clustering algorithms. We present a thorough glyph design, which is founded in a comprehensive survey of related work and report the results of a controlled experiments, where participants solved data analysis tasks with both glyphs and a traditional textual display of data values.

Business Intelligence applications often handle data sets that contain uncertain values. In this work we focus on product costing, which deals with the average costs of product components - that vary significantly based on many factors such as inflation, exchange rates, and commodity prices. After experts provide the uncertainty information for single items, decision makers need to quickly understand the cost uncertainties within the hierarchical data structure of the complete product.

Summary Since multitouch interfaces are steadily moving out of the experimental niche, the demand for comprehensive programming support increases. Between the formation of de facto standards for multitouch gestures by the industry, and continued research and experimentation by developers or academia, the abstraction of gesture properties becomes essential. This paper contributes a revision of the Gesture Formalization for Multitouch (GeForMT) gesture description language. This language aims at a short and concise syntax, which is still able to capture the complexity of multitouch gestures. We report on a previously missing reference architecture and practical implementation. Based on a study comparing the revised GeForMT language with other formalization approaches for multitouch gestures, we introduce an editor for GeForMT.Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

In this paper, we investigate interaction of children with interactive tabletops in kindergarten environments. In our understanding, such environments feature a certain degree of supervision, group play, as well as sole activities. In contrast to the traditional desktop PC workplace, interactive tabletops encourage communication and social interaction between children. In order to observe interaction and collaboration, we developed a suite of playful applications called VisMo, which we tailored to the needs and expectations of the target group. Our observational study with twelve Kindergarten children highlights pedagogical and usability aspects. We observed motivation and collaboration of the children and used a formal notation to transcribe their performed multitouch gestures.

Interactive tabletops foster collaborative work by supporting face-to-face communication and by offering an interactive surface to continually visualize and integrate the current state of work. Through multi-touch technology, multiple fingers and even parts of the hand can be recognized. Hence, natural interaction with graphical objects can be enhanced. However, ergonomic constraints in shape, size and agility of the hand and fingers can reduce effective and efficient object manipulation. By virtually extending the representation of the fingers and the transformed objects themselves we seek to overcome these limitations. Common collaborative tasks on large touch surfaces are transformation and spatial grouping of graphical objects. Therefore, we present two novel interaction techniques: Scoop Net and Pinch Helper. Scoop Net is based on naive physics and allows users to select and move multiple objects in one seamless action. Pinch Helper supports the execution of a pinch gesture by transforming objects that are too small to be targeted by multiple fingers.

Interaction design for mobile applications is challenging due to the diversity of technologies and devices. In addition, the now ubiquitous multi-touch screens demand novel and engaging interface metaphors. In this paper, we report insights and three practical results from a workshop with undergraduate students. The aim was to experiment with new technologies by providing a set of creativity techniques for ideation. By tackling interaction design both for tablets and smartphones, flexible interface metaphors were developed.

In Enterprise Information Systems, users are facing complex user interfaces with a multitude of functionalities. These interfaces still rely on the WIMP-paradigm including forms, tables and dashboards, which are meant to be used with mouse and keyboard. This contribution argues that there is a gap between the increased process complexity and the traditional concepts in visualization and interaction. In this paper, an exemplary scenario addresses these challenges by exploiting tangible interaction on a tabletop system.

In this paper we describe DepthTouch, an installation which explores future interactive surfaces and features elastic feedback, allowing the user to go deeper than with regular multi-touch surfaces. DepthTouch's elastic display allows the user to create valleys and ascending slopes by depressing or grabbing its textile surface. We describe the experimental approach for eliciting appropriate interaction metaphors from interaction with real materials and the resulting digital prototype.

Accustomed to traditional user experiences with mouse and keyboard, designers are challenged to break free and find new and compelling approaches to interaction design for natural user interfaces. Tangible and embodied interaction works in parallel, is quick, and allows cooperative work. This exploration serves to inspire and provoke critical reflection on interaction design for natural user interfaces based on physical substances that are used in everyday life -- like eggs, soap bubbles, and magnets.