The effect of responsive web design on the user experience with laptop and smartphone devices

The introduction of smartphones with their accompanying capacity to access the Internet, changed the way the Internet is used.Many people now use mobile devices to browse the Web. However, the varying screen sizes of these devices portend some impact on their users’ experience, as the Web content on the devices vary in size and the navigation of pages are also different in the various devices.The advent of the responsive web design (RWD) philosophy, revolutionized the way Web pages are designed and the way they appear to the users in the various devices.RWD makes Web pages to adjust to the size of any devices’ screen irrespective of the device type.In this study, the effect of responsive web design of the user experience with a laptop and smartphone devices while using the e-Ebola Awareness System, (a Web based health awareness portal for Ebola virus disease), was measured and evaluated. The results revealed that users had a better user experience with Smartphones than with laptops while using the system, however, for most of the metrics collected, users’ experiences with the two device types were not significantly different at 95% level of confidence, implying that for those metrics, the responsive web design had a similar effect on the users’ experiences and attitudes

Proceedings of the ECIR2010 workshop on information access for personal media archives (IAPMA2010), Milton Keynes, UK, 28 March 2010

Towards e-Memories: challenges of capturing, summarising, presenting, understanding, using, and retrieving relevant information from heterogeneous data contained in personal media archives. This is the proceedings of the inaugural workshop on “Information Access for Personal Media Archives”. It is now possible to archive much of our life experiences in digital form using a variety of sources, e.g. blogs written, tweets made, social network status updates, photographs taken, videos seen, music heard, physiological monitoring, locations visited and environmentally sensed data of those places, details of people met, etc. Information can be captured from a myriad of personal information devices including desktop computers, PDAs, digital cameras, video and audio recorders, and various sensors, including GPS, Bluetooth, and biometric devices. In this workshop research from diverse disciplines was presented on how we can advance towards the goal of effective capture, retrieval and exploration of e-memories

Review of Networking and Tangible Security Techniques for Domestic IoT Devices and Initial Ideas

The number of connected devices including Internet of Things (IoTs) on the Internet is growing fast. According to recent Gartner research, the estimated number of IoT devices is 5.8 billion in 2020 (Gartner, 2019). The countries that are leading the way to IoT deployment include North America, Western Europe and China (Kandaswamy and Furlonger, 2018). By 2024, the number of Machine-2-Machine (M2M) connections between these devices are expected to reach 27 billion in 2024 (Kandaswamy and Furlonger, 2018). This growth in M2M connectivity is expected to result from wide range of application areas such as smart cities, smart infrastructure, smart energy among many others (Hassija et al., 2019).This wide spread of IoTs has sparked significant research interest to understand various implications (Airehrour et al., 2016; Neshenko et al., 2019; Hassija et al., 2019). IoTs enable the integration between many objects in our daily life (Aazam et al., 2016; Alaba et al., 2017) such as sensors, objects, wearable devices and other types of machines. IoT devices are capable of communicating directly with one another and sharing data without direct human intervention (Crabtree et al., 2018). These “things” could be any traditional objects such as home appliance (e.g. microwave, fridge) or tiny sensor (e.g. humidity or health sensors). The devices are capable of constant collections of various sensitive and personal data about many aspect of our lives due to its pervasive deployment (Ren et al., 2019).This paper provides an overview of the literature relating to securing IoT with an emphasis on usability from a user perspective as well as approaches to securing access to these devices over the Internet. Although IoT deployment occurs in various settings, i.e. industrial IoT deployment, we mainly focus in this paper on private residential home deployment (i.e. consumer IoTs). We assume that in such settings, users are mostly not experts in security IoT or the underlying networking principles.This paper is organized as follows: section II discusses various protocols and networking security tools (e.g. firewall and Virtual Private Network (VPN)). Section II-D discusses various approaches to simplify cyber-security by using user-centred approaches. In section III, we present a number of existing including enterprise-grade solutions that could be adopted to secure remote access to IoT devices in domestic settings

Capturing Situational Context in an Augmented Memory System

Bookmarking a moment is a new approach being introduced to capture past experience and insert information into an augmented memory system. This idea is inspired from the concept of the bookmark in web browsers. Semi-automatic bookmarking different moments when time is limited and revisiting these moments before inserting them into an augmented memory system will help people to remember their past experience. An exploratory study was conducted to discover and shape the design requirements for a system called CatchIt. It aims to understand end-users’ needs to capture their personal experience, which is an important and complex issue in the case of capture and access of personal experiences. CatchIt is a system to bookmark the significant moments during the day before enriching them, and entering them into the augmented memory system called Digital Parrot. The conceptual design of CatchIt will be the main aim of this study. The primary requirements were derived from the scenarios and analysis of the findings of five different study stages were designed to inspect these: unobserved field visit, shadowing, using indictors, Wizard of Oz and using technology. Thirty participants were involved in field visit, survey and follows up interview. Each stage had different tasks to be performed and the findings of each stage contributed to understanding different parts of user needs and system design requirements. The results of this study indicated the system should automatically record the context information, especially the time and location since they were typically neglected by the participants. Different information such as textual and visual information should be manually recorded based on the users’ setting or situations. A single button is a promising input mechanism to bookmark a moment and it should be fast and effort- less. The result showed no clear correlation between learning style and type of the information that had been captured. Also, we found that there might be a correlation between passive capture and false memories. All these findings were used to provide a foundation for further work to implement the bookmark system and evaluate this approach. Some issues raised in this study need further research. The work will contribute to a greater understanding of human memory and selective capture

Augmented Reality: A Technology and Policy Primer

The vision for AR dates back at least until the 1960s with the work of Ivan Sutherland. In a way, AR represents a natural evolution of information communication technology. Our phones, cars, and other devices are increasingly reactive to the world around us. But AR also represents a serious departure from the way people have perceived data for most of human history: a Neolithic cave painting or book operates like a laptop insofar as each presents information to the user in a way that is external to her and separate from her present reality. By contrast, AR begins to collapse millennia of distinction between display and environment. Today, a number of companies are investing heavily in AR and beginning to deploy consumer-facing devices and applications. These systems have the potential to deliver enormous value, including to populations with limited physical or other resources. Applications include hands-free instruction and training, language translation, obstacle avoidance, advertising, gaming, museum tours, and much more. AR also presents novel or acute challenges for technologists and policymakers, including privacy, distraction, and discrimination. This whitepaper—which grows out of research conducted across three units through the University of Washington’s interdisciplinary Tech Policy Lab—is aimed at identifying some of the major legal and policy issues AR may present as a novel technology, and outlines some conditional recommendations to help address those issues. Our key findings include: 1. AR exists in a variety of configurations, but in general, AR is a mobile or embedded technology that senses, processes, and outputs data in real-time, recognizes and tracks real-world objects, and provides contextual information by supplementing or replacing human senses. 2. AR systems will raise legal and policy issues in roughly two categories: collection and display. Issues tend to include privacy, free speech, and intellectual property as well as novel forms of distraction and discrimination. 3. We recommend that policymakers—broadly defined—engage in diverse stakeholder analysis, threat modeling, and risk assessment processes. We recommend that they pay particular attention to: a) the fact that adversaries succeed when systems fail to anticipate behaviors; and that, b) not all stakeholders experience AR the same way. 4. Architectural/design decisions—such as whether AR systems are open or closed, whether data is ephemeral or stored, where data is processed, and so on—will each have policy consequences that vary by stakeholder.https://digitalcommons.law.uw.edu/techlab/1000/thumbnail.jp

Personalization in cultural heritage: the road travelled and the one ahead

Over the last 20 years, cultural heritage has been a favored domain for personalization research. For years, researchers have experimented with the cutting edge technology of the day; now, with the convergence of internet and wireless technology, and the increasing adoption of the Web as a platform for the publication of information, the visitor is able to exploit cultural heritage material before, during and after the visit, having different goals and requirements in each phase. However, cultural heritage sites have a huge amount of information to present, which must be filtered and personalized in order to enable the individual user to easily access it. Personalization of cultural heritage information requires a system that is able to model the user (e.g., interest, knowledge and other personal characteristics), as well as contextual aspects, select the most appropriate content, and deliver it in the most suitable way. It should be noted that achieving this result is extremely challenging in the case of first-time users, such as tourists who visit a cultural heritage site for the first time (and maybe the only time in their life). In addition, as tourism is a social activity, adapting to the individual is not enough because groups and communities have to be modeled and supported as well, taking into account their mutual interests, previous mutual experience, and requirements. How to model and represent the user(s) and the context of the visit and how to reason with regard to the information that is available are the challenges faced by researchers in personalization of cultural heritage. Notwithstanding the effort invested so far, a definite solution is far from being reached, mainly because new technology and new aspects of personalization are constantly being introduced. This article surveys the research in this area. Starting from the earlier systems, which presented cultural heritage information in kiosks, it summarizes the evolution of personalization techniques in museum web sites, virtual collections and mobile guides, until recent extension of cultural heritage toward the semantic and social web. The paper concludes with current challenges and points out areas where future research is needed

Designing and evaluating a user interface for continous embedded lifelogging based on physical context

PhD ThesisAn increase in both personal information and storage capacity has encouraged people to store and archive their life experience in multimedia formats. The usefulness of such large amounts of data will remain inadequate without the development of both retrieval techniques and interfaces that help people access and navigate their personal collections. The research described in this thesis investigates lifelogging technology from the perspective of the psychology of memory and human-computer interaction. The research described seeks to increase my understanding of what data can trigger memories and how I might use this insight to retrieve past life experiences in interfaces to lifelogging technology. The review of memory and previous research on lifelogging technology allows and support me to establish a clear understanding of how memory works and design novel and effective memory cues; whilst at the same time I critiqued existing lifelogging systems and approaches to retrieving memories of past actions and activities. In the initial experiments I evaluated the design and implementation of a prototype which exposed numerous problems both in the visualisation of data and usability. These findings informed the design of novel lifelogging prototype to facilitate retrieval. I assessed the second prototype and determined how an improved system supported access and retrieval of users’ past life experiences, in particular, how users group their data into events, how they interact with their data, and the classes of memories that it supported. In this doctoral thesis I found that visualizing the movements of users’ hands and bodies facilitated grouping activities into events when combined with the photos and other data captured at the same time. In addition, the movements of the user's hand and body and the movements of some objects can promote an activity recognition or support user detection and grouping of them into events. Furthermore, the ability to search for specific movements significantly reduced the amount of time that it took to retrieve data related to specific events. I revealed three major strategies that users followed to understand the combined data: skimming sequences, cross sensor jumping and continued scanning

“Reality is in the air”: concept of perceived augmentation and exploration of its impact on consumer experience

Augmented reality (AR) technology is becoming increasingly used in marketing as a tool for enhancing consumer experience. Developed and defined in the fields of computer science and human-computer interaction, AR technology simulates an overlay of virtual annotations in the physical environment and interacts with it in real- time (Azuma et al., 2001). Some popular examples of AR include virtual mirrors (Ray Ban, ModiFace) and smartphone applications that simulate products such as furniture (IKEA). Despite its increasing deployment in marketing, related academic research about the significance of AR for consumer experience and its impact on consumer behavior has been scarce. This thesis approaches this gap in the literature by studying media characteristics of AR and examining their impact on consumer affective, cognitive and behavioral responses, following the approach of Theory of Interactive Media Effects by Sundar et al. (2015). Throughout a series of four articles, it aims to define salient media characteristics of AR technology and evaluate how they alter consumer experience. The 1st article examines to which extent AR shares media characteristics of other interactive technologies and how these characteristics – namely interactivity, modality, hypertextuality, connectivity, location-specificity, mobility, virtuality – influence consumer responses. Based on a literature review, a research agenda is proposed that identifies the knowledge gaps related to the impact of AR on various types of consumer responses. For example, it suggests that future research should investigate: how lower levels of hypertextuality in an AR app influence consumer satisfaction and exploratory behavior; how can AR represent a social experience, given that little connectivity is present in the current AR apps; what combinations of modality in terms of text, visuals and audio are most effective for AR; to which extent consumers perceive AR apps to be interactive and how that impacts their experience. Finally, the research agenda also underlines the importance of investigating the AR media characteristic augmentation (Preece et al., 2015), absent in previous interactive technologies. The 2nd article focuses on two salient media characteristics of AR apps – interactivity and augmentation. It shows that the presence of AR does not translate into an app being perceived as more interactive in comparison to a non-AR app in terms of control and responsiveness. On the other hand, the study offers first evidence that perceived augmentation is significantly higher for AR apps than for non-AR apps and that it represents a suitable psychological correlate (Sundar et al., 2015) for measuring the perception of AR characteristics that set it apart from other technologies. Two experimental studies demonstrate that perceived augmentation impacts the level of immersion into flow, which then mediates the impact of perceived augmentation on consumer attitude towards the app and behavioral intentions to use it again and talk about it. Based on the previous study, the 3rd article further develops the measurement items of perceived augmentation and investigates its impact on consumer experience. An in-the-wild study (Rogers, 2012) was conducted in a retail store, where we observed consumers’ interaction with an AR make-up try-on application. The findings show that such an application creates a playful experience and that shoppers would use such tool to narrow their consideration set or, in some cases, to even choose products to purchase. Furthermore, the survey study confirms that perceived augmentation significantly relates with playfulness, perceived convenience and behavioral intentions. Finally, a more complete scale for perceived augmentation is developed and validated in the 4th article. Items are refined through several qualitative studies, based on which we propose that perceived augmentation is comprised of two dimensions – virtual enhancement and virtual- physical congruency. An online study with 213 participants confirms this dimensionality and, furthermore, shows that virtual-physical congruency elicits significant impact on enjoyment and perceived informedness, which further impacts future use and purchase intention, while virtual enhancement does not yield a similar impact. The contribution of this thesis lies in defining perceived augmentation as the psychological correlate of AR’s unique media characteristic, augmentation, and in proposing and validating its measurement items. Furthermore, a series of three larger studies, all situated in different contexts (in a lab, in a retail store, online), explain how perceived augmentation yields a significant impact on consumer affective responses and behavioral intentions, and in some cases also on cognitive responses such as perceived convenience and informedness. It also highlights the importance of AR app integration in a specific context, which can prevent it from being perceived as gimmicky. The results of this work have implications for both practitioners and academics and offer numerous directions for future research

Cognition and the Web

Empirical research related to the Web has typically focused on its impact to social relationships and wider society; however, the cognitive impact of the Web is also an increasing focus of scientific interest and research attention. In this paper, I attempt to provide an overview of what I see as the important issues in the debate regarding the relationship between human cognition and the Web. I argue that the Web is potentially poised to transform our cognitive and epistemic profiles, but that in order to understand the nature of this influence we need to countenance a position that factors in the available scientific evidence, the changing nature of our interaction with the Web, and the possibility that many of our everyday cognitive achievements rely on complex webs of social and technological scaffolding. I review the literature relating to the cognitive effects of current Web technology, and I attempt to anticipate the cognitive impact of next-generation technologies, such as Web-based augmented reality systems and the transition to data-centric modes of information representation. I suggest that additional work is required to more fully understand the cognitive impact of both current and future Web technologies, and I identify some of the issues for future scientific work in this area. Given that recent scientific effort around the Web has coalesced into a new scientific discipline, namely that of Web Science, I suggest that many of the issues related to cognition and the Web could form part of the emerging Web Science research agenda