Co-design techniques generally rely upon higher-order cognitive skills, such as abstraction and creativity, meaning they may be inaccessible to people with intellectual disabilities (ID). Consequently, investigators must adjust the methods employed throughout their studies to ensure the complex needs of people with ID are appropriately catered to. Yet, there are a lack of guidelines to support researchers in this process, with previous literature often neglecting to discuss the decisions made during the development of their study protocols. We propose a new procedure to overcome this lack of support, by utilizing the knowledge of “experts” in ID to design a more accessible workshop for the target population. 12 experts across two focus groups were successful in identifying accessibility barriers throughout a set of typical early co-design activities. Recommendations to overcome these barriers are discussed along with lessons on how to better support people with ID to engage in co-design.

Patients with mild intellectual disabilities (ID) face significant communication barriers within primary care services. This has a detrimental effect on the quality of treatment being provided, meaning the consultation process could benefit from augmentative and alternative communication (AAC) technologies. However, little research has been conducted in this area beyond that of paper-based aids. We address this by extracting design requirements for a clinical AAC tablet application from n=10 adults with mild ID. Our results show that such technologies can promote communication between general practitioners (GPs) and patients with mild ID by extracting symptoms in advance of the consultation via an accessible questionnaire. These symptoms act as a referent and assist in raising the awareness of conditions commonly overlooked by GPs. Furthermore, the application can support people with ID in identifying and accessing healthcare services. Finally, the participants identified 6 key factors that affect the clarity of medical images.

In 2013, the UK national renal registry established 57,000 adults in the UK were treated for advanced kidney failure, 23,683 (42%) receiving haemodialysis. Haemodialysis patients face some of the highest treatment burden in the National Health Service (NHS) and are among the most 'expensive' to treat. In addition, patients endure complex treatment trajectories. In this study, we have sought to gather and synthesise the opinion of clinical and Human Computer Interaction (HCI) domain experts (n=9) to establish a set of initial design requirements in order to test the feasibility of developing a digital aid (i.e. electronic haemodialysis patient portal) to support patients in the course of their treatment. Expert feedback was gathered by means of interviews and focus groups in order to instruct design requirements for a haemodialysis patient portal.

Previous studies have suggested that the learning disability (LD) population face significant communication barriers when interacting with health professionals. Such obstacles may be considered as preventable; however, there is a surprising lack of research-based technologies available that intend to promote this communication. We aim to address this issue by investigating the potential use of mobile technologies to support adults with mild LDs during clinical consultations. To achieve this, we interviewed 10 domain experts including government advisors, academics, support workers and General Practitioners. The extracted information was used to develop an initial technology probe, which was evaluated by a subset of the aforementioned experts. The overall contribution of this research is a set of design guidelines for the development of Augmentative and Communicative technologies that target the clinical needs of adults with mild LDs.

Design of text entry on small screen devices, e.g. smartwatches, faces two related challenges: trading off a reasonably sized keyboard area against space to display the entered text and the concern over "fat fingers". This paper investigates tap accuracy and revisits layered interfaces to explore a novel layered text entry method. A two part user study identifies preferred typing and reading tilt angles and then investigates variants of a tilting layered keyboard against a standard layout. We show good typing speed (29 wpm) and very high accuracy on the standard layout - contradicting fears of fat-fingers limiting watch text-entry. User feedback is positive towards tilting interaction and we identify ∼14° tilt as a comfortable typing angle. However, layering resulted in slightly slower and more erroneous entry. The paper contributes new data on tilt angles and key offsets for smartwatch text entry and supporting evidence for the suitability of QWERTY on smartwatches.

As part of ongoing research we analysed user experience of a group of people with aphasia by applying the Technology Appropriation Model. Appropriation is defined as the way in which users adapt the functionality of technology to suit their needs, often in ways the designers would not have predicted. Currently over 250,000 people in the UK and 1,000,000 people in the US have aphasia. We discovered that Appropriation analysis can be a useful tool for requirements analysis of software, especially in cases where the user has trouble communicating about abstract or imagined scenarios, as is the case for many with Aphasia. We also discovered that Appropriation often stems from the user not knowing the full capabilities of the device or what applications are already available

This PVA-shortpaper introduces an enhancement to the Keystroke-Level Model (KLM) by extending it with three new operators to describe interactions on mobile touchscreen devices. Based on Fitts's Law we modelled a performance measure estimate equation for each common touch screen interaction. Three prototypes were developed to serve as a test environment in which to validate Fitts's equations and estimate the parameters for these interactions. A total of 3090 observations were made with a total of 51 users. While the studies confirmed each interaction fitted well to Fitts's Law for most interactions, it was noticed that Fitts's Law does not fit well for interactions with an Index of Difficulty exceeding 4 bits, highlighting a possible maximum comfortable stretch. Based on results, the following approximate movement times for KLM are suggested: 70ms for a short untargeted swipe, 200ms for a half-screen sized zoom, and 80ms for an icon pointing from a home position. These results could be used by developers of mobile phone and tablet applications to describe tasks as a sequence of the operators used and to predict user interaction times prior to creating prototypes.

The need for text entry on smartphones and other touch-screen devices is key for many tasks and also a key factor in the usability of these devices. Physical and cognitive issues associated with age can aggravate the task of text entry for older adults. Technological exclusion due to low usability can present a significant problem both for social and ongoing business-related tasks with older adults. This paper investigates a new touch-screen keyboard design for older adults that combines the familiar QWERTY keyboard layout with physical gesture. User studies with older adults showed our keyboard reduced miss-taps, but was slower to use, and raised issues for further research.

Many countries have an increasingly aging population. In recent years, mobile technologies have had a massive impact on social and working lives. As the size of the older user population rises, many people will want to continue professional, social and lifestyle usage of mobiles into 70s and beyond. Mobile technologies can lead to increased community involvement and personal independence. While mobile technologies can provide many opportunities, the aging process can interfere with their use. This workshop brings together researchers who are re-imagining common mobile interfaces so that they are more suited to use by older adults.

This paper presents a new optimization technique for keyboard layouts based on Pareto front optimization. We used this multifactorial technique to create two new touchscreen phone keyboard layouts based on three design metrics: minimizing finger travel distance in order to maximize text entry speed, a new metric to maximize the quality of spell correction by reducing tap ambiguity, and maximizing familiarity through a similarity function with the standard Qwerty layout. The paper describes the optimization process and resulting layouts for a standard trapezoid shaped keyboard and a more rectangular layout. Fitts' law modelling shows a predicted 11% improvement in entry speed without taking into account the significantly improved error correction potential and the subsequent effect on speed. In initial user tests typing speed dropped from approx. 21 wpm with Qwerty to 13 wpm (64%) on first use of our layout but recovered to 18 wpm (85%) within four short trial sessions, and was still improving. NASA TLX forms showed no significant difference on load between Qwerty and our new layout use in the fourth session. Together we believe this shows the new layouts are faster and can be quickly adopted by users.

In this paper we describe the design concept, prototype development, and initial findings for a mobile guide supporting serendipitous exploration of a city. The system will allow a tourist to freely explore a new city, while providing them with peace of mind to not accidentally walk past attractions they desire to see. We have developed a proximity model and vibration patterns for alerts, and devised ways of mitigating tradeoffs between battery use and location accuracy.

Predictive text entry provides a fast way to enter text on phones and other small devices. Early work on predictive text entry highlighted that the reaction time for checking the screen dominates text entry times. Improving accuracy of predictions brings a downside: as prediction gets better, users will drop the slow operation of checking the screen and will thus miss prediction errors and system feedback/suggestions. In this note, we present an experiment into the use of vibration to alert the user when word completion is likely to aid them, using a dynamic approach based on their current typing speed, and when there are no dictionary matches to their entry. Results show significantly faster entry rates for users with vibration alerts, raising speeds from 20wpm to 23wpm once practiced.

Tourism has been a key driver for mobile applications. This short paper presents the design and initial evaluation of a mobile phone based visualisation to support skiers. Paper piste maps often prove difficult for skiers and provide no natural way of assessing the mountain conditions while on the slope. They are physically large and difficult to manipulate in wind, they provide no information on which runs are currently open, no indication of which runs the user may find most enjoyable, and no information about the snow and weather conditions on each run. All this information is available at resorts, usually on notice boards or screens at central meeting points. The visualisation and personalisation approaches presented here combine this information and a map overview on a mobile phone screen. Initial trials showed significantly better performance for some tasks on the mobile condition (both in terms of accuracy and time), with no clear result for other tasks.

This demonstration introduces AdapTex: a new text entry system that suggests words and phrases to the user based on the current working context on the device, the user's history on the device and an initial corpus analysis. User studies show that AdapTex speeds up text entry while reducing errors.

Capturing, defining, and modeling the essence of context are challenging, compelling, and prominent issues for interdisciplinary research and discussion. The roots of its emergence lie in the inconsistencies and ambivalent definitions across and within different research specializations (e.g., philosophy, psychology, pragmatics, linguistics, computer science, and artificial intelligence). Within the area of computer science, the advent of mobile context-aware computing has stimulated broad and contrasting interpretations due to the shift from traditional static desktop computing to heterogeneous mobile environments. This transition poses many challenging, complex, and largely unanswered research issues relating to contextual interactions and usability. To address those issues, many researchers strongly encourage a multidisciplinary approach. The primary aim of this article is to review and unify theories of context within linguistics, computer science, and psychology. Summary models within each discipline are used to propose an outline and detailed multidisciplinary model of context involving (a) the differentiation of focal and contextual aspects of the user and application's world, (b) the separation of meaningful and incidental dimensions, and (c) important user and application processes. The models provide an important foundation in which complex mobile scenarios can be conceptualized and key human and social issues can be identified. The models were then applied to different applications of context-aware computing involving user communities and mobile tourist guides. The authors' future work involves developing a user-centered multidisciplinary design framework (based on their proposed models). This will be used to design a large-scale user study investigating the usability issues of a context-aware mobile computing navigation aid for visually impaired people.

Evaluation in information retrieval (IR) has focussed largely on noninteractive evaluation of text retrieval systems. This is increasingly at odds with how people use modern IR systems: in highly interactive settings to access linked, multimedia information. Furthermore, this approach ignores potential improvements through better interface design. In 1996, the Commission of the European Union Information Technologies Programme funded a 3-year working group, Mira, to discuss and advance research in the area of evaluation frameworks for interactive and multimedia IR applications. Led by Keith van Rijsbergen, Steve Draper, and myself from Glasgow University, this working group brought together many of the leading researchers in the evaluation domain from both the IR and human–computer interaction (HCI) communities. This article presents my personal view of the main lines of discussion that took place throughout Mira: importing and adapting evaluation techniques from HCI, evaluating at different levels as appropriate, evaluating against different types of relevance and the new challenges that drive the need for rethinking the old evaluation approaches. The article concludes that we need to consider more varied forms of evaluation to complement engine evaluation.

This special issue presents current work on modelling interactive information retrieval systems and users' interactions with them. This introductory paper analyses the papers in the context of evaluation in information retrieval (IR) by examining the different layers at which IR system use could be evaluated. IR poses the double evaluation problem of evaluating both the underlying system effectiveness and the overall ability of the system to aid users. The papers in this collection look at different issues in combining human-computer interaction (HCI) research with IR research and provide insights into the problems of evaluating the information seeking process.

“Time is money”, especially if you are downloading web pages over low-bandwidth telephone lines. All too often this investment goes unrewarded. Users simply cannot extract relevant information from the mass of data that is being provided over the Internet. This information saturation is exacerbated by the problems of electronic gridlock. The increasing demand for remote resources has led to increasing delays during peak periods on popular sites. This paper argues that, in the short term, technological solutions to these problems will not keep pace with the exponential growth in demand. The world's communications infrastructure cannot be improved at the rate that would be required to combat increasing retrieval delays. We, therefore, advocate interface design techniques as the only effective means of addressing the usability problems that frustrate interaction with Internet resources. Later sections introduce a central argument that links the papers in this special edition. Collaborative approaches to information retrieval, where search engines are augmented by advice from human experts, can reduce the problems of electronic gridlock and information saturation.

The most common method for assessing the worth of an information retrieval (lR) system is through precision and recall graphs.These graphs show how precise an IR engine is when working at fixed levels of recall.This paper introduces number-lo-view graphs, a new graphing method based on an early evaluation measure, which supplement precisionrecall graphs by plotting the number of relevant documents a user wishes against the number of documents they would have to view to encounter them.The paper also proposes a step forward from number-to-view graphs that directly includes presentation, interface and temporal issues within the same frame work as engine effectiveness: time-to-view graphs.Taken together, these graphs and models introduce a new evaluation approach called Expected Search Duration.

This paper presents a model for retrieval of images from a large World Wide Web based collection.Rather than considering complex visual recognition algorithms, the model presented is based on combining evidence of the text content and hypertext structure of the Web.The paper shows that certain types of query are amply served by this form of representation.It also presents a novel means of gathering relevance judgments.

Traditional information retrieval (IR) systems only allow users access to documents that match their current query, and therefore, users can only give relevance feedback on matching documents (or those with a matching strength greater than a set threshold. This article shows that, in systems that allow access to nonmatching documents (e.g., hybrid hypertext and information retrieval systems), the strength of the effect of giving relevance feedback varies between matching and nonmatching documents. For positive feedback the results shown here are encouraging, as they can be justified by an intuitive view of the process. However, for negative feedback the results show behavior that cannot easily be justified and that varies greatly depending on the model of feedback used.