The number of households using stand-alone conversational agents is rapidly increasing. However, recent research revealed that in some of these households, use of agents decreases over time, and we know little about why. Therefore, we aim to understand how people utilize such devices in their daily lives and to explore the associated obstacles or difficulties. We conducted a long-term (12-week) user study in which we followed eight households, examining their use of Amazon Echo at home. From a series of diaries, surveys, and interviews with eight first-time users, we identified how their experiences changed over time and how conversational agents lose their presence at home. We found that voice interface, physical form, and at-home installation affect users' perceptions and expectations of smart speakers. Based on these findings, we discuss challenges and design opportunities for future at-home conversational agents.

Today, intelligent assistants, such as Apple's Siri, becoming a part of our everyday life. While there have been many studies focused on technologies, there are no studies dealing with design issues at the initial stage of the design, the stage prior to system implementation. Although the designers had a lot of questions in the design process, such as how the personality of virtual assistant should be, how users could discover the way of interacting, the designers had to rely on imagination. In this paper, we present a user-friendly way of designing intelligent assistant which allow designers and engineers to explore the possible design problems and solutions through user participation, before all the complex systems are ready to run. Through a low-tech approach involving two users, we could understand the behavior of users with intelligent assistants in an easy and fast way.

Advances in dynamic gesture recognition technologies now make it possible to investigate freehand input techniques. This study tried to understand how users manipulate digital content on a distant screen by hand gesture interaction in a living room environment. While there have been many existing studies that investigate freehand input techniques, we developed and applied a novel study methodology based on a combination of both an existing user elicitation study and conventional Wizard-of-Oz study that involved another non-technical user for providing feedback. Through the study, many useful issues and implications for making freehand gesture interaction design more natural in a living room environment were generated which have not been covered in previous works. Furthermore, we could observe how the initial user-defined gestures are changed over time.

This study is aimed at understanding deformation-based user gestures by observing users interacting with artificial deformable displays with various levels of flexibility. We gained user-defined gestures that would help with the design and implementation of deformation-based interface, without considering current technical limitations. We found that when a display material gave more freedom from deformation, the level of consensus of gestures among the users as well as the intuitiveness and preferences were all enhanced. This study offers implications for deformation-based interaction which will be helpful for both designers and engineers who are trying to set the direction for future interface and technology development.

We propose a new perspective, seeing interactivity that is the immaterial part of an interactive artifact as something concretely describable and perceivable as we do with physical materials. In order to examine the validity of this proposal, we extracted a set of interactivity attributes to be used as a design language for thinking and describing interactivity in a new way, and conducted an online survey with 14 Flash prototypes representing pairs of values of 7 interactivity attributes we extracted. The result showed that all the interactivity attributes were significant, and participants experienced distinctive and meaningful emotional effects for different interactivity attributes.