Data Driven Analysis of Tiny Touchscreen Performance with MicroJam

The widespread adoption of mobile devices, such as smartphones and tablets, has made touchscreens a common interface for musical performance. New mobile musical instruments have been designed that embrace collaborative creation and that explore the affordances of mobile devices, as well as their constraints. While these have been investigated from design and user experience perspectives, there is little examination of the performers' musical outputs. In this work, we introduce a constrained touchscreen performance app, MicroJam, designed to enable collaboration between performers, and engage in a novel data-driven analysis of more than 1600 performances using the app. MicroJam constrains performances to five seconds, and emphasises frequent and casual music making through a social media-inspired interface. Performers collaborate by replying to performances, adding new musical layers that are played back at the same time. Our analysis shows that users tend to focus on the centre and diagonals of the touchscreen area, and tend to swirl or swipe rather than tap. We also observe that while long swipes dominate the visual appearance of performances, the majority of interactions are short with limited expressive possibilities. Our findings are summarised into a set of design recommendations for MicroJam and other touchscreen apps for social musical interaction

Tangible user interfaces : past, present and future directions

In the last two decades, Tangible User Interfaces (TUIs) have emerged as a new interface type that interlinks the digital and physical worlds. Drawing upon users' knowledge and skills of interaction with the real non-digital world, TUIs show a potential to enhance the way in which people interact with and leverage digital information. However, TUI research is still in its infancy and extensive research is required in or- der to fully understand the implications of tangible user interfaces, to develop technologies that further bridge the digital and the physical, and to guide TUI design with empirical knowledge. This paper examines the existing body of work on Tangible User In- terfaces. We start by sketching the history of tangible user interfaces, examining the intellectual origins of this field. We then present TUIs in a broader context, survey application domains, and review frame- works and taxonomies. We also discuss conceptual foundations of TUIs including perspectives from cognitive sciences, phycology, and philoso- phy. Methods and technologies for designing, building, and evaluating TUIs are also addressed. Finally, we discuss the strengths and limita- tions of TUIs and chart directions for future research

The use of paper in everyday student life

The information we encounter in modern life, in developed countries, is a hybrid of the physical and the digital. Personal archiving tools allow users to capture and retrieve aspects of their everyday lives in digital form. In this paper we use a diary study of students’ interactions with paper-based information to inform the design of such archiving tools

Designing for frustration and disputes in the family car

This article appears with the express permission of the publisher, IGI Global.Families spend an increasing amount of time in the car carrying out a number of activities including driving to work, caring for children and co-ordinating drop-offs and pickups. While families travelling in cars may face stress from difficult road conditions, they are also likely to be frustrated by coordinating a number of activities and resolving disputes within the confined space of car. A rising number of in-car infotainment and driver-assistance systems aim to help reduce the stress from outside the vehicle and improve the experience of driving but may fail to address sources of stress from within the car. From ethnographic studies of family car journeys, we examine the work of parents in managing multiple stresses while driving, along with the challenges of distractions from media use in the car. Keeping these family extracts as a focus for analysis, we draw out some design considerations that help build on the observations from our empirical work.Microsoft Research and the Dorothy Hodgkin Awar

The patterning of finance/security : a designerly walkthrough of challenger banking apps

Culture is being ‘appified’. Diverse, pre-existing everyday activities are being redesigned so they happen with and through apps. While apps are often encountered as equivalent icons in apps stores or digital devices, the processes of appification – that is, the actions required to turn something into an app – vary significantly. In this article, we offer a comparative analysis of a number of ‘challenger’ banking apps in the United Kingdom. As a retail service, banking is highly regulated and banks must take steps to identify and verify their customers before entering a retail relationship. Once established, this ‘secured’ financial identity underpins a lot of everyday economic activity. Adopting the method of the walkthrough analysis, we study the specific ways these processes of identifying and verifying the identity of the customer (now the user) occur through user onboarding. We argue that banking apps provide a unique way of binding the user to an identity, one that combines the affordances of smart phones with the techniques, knowledge and patterns of user experience design. With the appification of banking, we see new processes of security folded into the everyday experience of apps. Our analysis shows how these binding identities are achieved through what we refer to as the patterning of finance/security. This patterning is significant, moreover, given its availability for wider circulation beyond the context of retail banking apps

A Virtual Conversational Agent for Teens with Autism: Experimental Results and Design Lessons

We present the design of an online social skills development interface for teenagers with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). The interface is intended to enable private conversation practice anywhere, anytime using a web-browser. Users converse informally with a virtual agent, receiving feedback on nonverbal cues in real-time, and summary feedback. The prototype was developed in consultation with an expert UX designer, two psychologists, and a pediatrician. Using the data from 47 individuals, feedback and dialogue generation were automated using a hidden Markov model and a schema-driven dialogue manager capable of handling multi-topic conversations. We conducted a study with nine high-functioning ASD teenagers. Through a thematic analysis of post-experiment interviews, identified several key design considerations, notably: 1) Users should be fully briefed at the outset about the purpose and limitations of the system, to avoid unrealistic expectations. 2) An interface should incorporate positive acknowledgment of behavior change. 3) Realistic appearance of a virtual agent and responsiveness are important in engaging users. 4) Conversation personalization, for instance in prompting laconic users for more input and reciprocal questions, would help the teenagers engage for longer terms and increase the system's utility