Understanding Shoulder Surfing in the Wild: Stories from Users and Observers

Research has brought forth a variety of authentication systems to mitigate observation attacks. However, there is little work about shoulder surfing situations in the real world. We present the results of a user survey (N=174) in which we investigate actual stories about shoulder surfing on mobile devices from both users and observers. Our analysis indicates that shoulder surfing mainly occurs in an opportunistic, non-malicious way. It usually does not have serious consequences, but evokes negative feelings for both parties, resulting in a variety of coping strategies. Observed data was personal in most cases and ranged from information about interests and hobbies to login data and intimate details about third persons and relationships. Thus, our work contributes evidence for shoulder surfing in the real world and informs implications for the design of privacy protection mechanisms

Designing for Shareable Interfaces in the Wild

Despite excitement about the potential of interactive tabletops to support collaborative work, there have been few empirical demonstrations of their effectiveness (Marshall et al., 2011). In particular, while lab-based studies have explored the effects of individual design features, there has been a dearth of studies evaluating the success of systems in the wild. For this technology to be of value, designers and systems builders require a better understanding of how to develop and evaluate tabletop applications to be deployed in real world settings. This dissertation reports on two systems designed through a process that incorporated ethnography-style observations, iterative design and in the wild evaluation. The first study focused on collaborative learning in a medical setting. To address the fact that visitors to a hospital emergency ward were leaving with an incomplete understanding of their diagnosis and treatment, a system was prototyped in a working Emergency Room (ER) with doctors and patients. The system was found to be helpful but adoption issues hampered its impact. The second study focused on a planning application for visitors to a tourist information centre. Issues and opportunities for a successful, contextually-fitted system were addressed and it was found to be effective in supporting group planning activities by novice users, in particular, facilitating users’ first experiences, providing effective signage and offering assistance to guide the user through the application. This dissertation contributes to understanding of multi-user systems through literature review of tabletop systems, collaborative tasks, design frameworks and evaluation of prototypes. Some support was found for the claim that tabletops are a useful technology for collaboration, and several issues were discussed. Contributions to understanding in this field are delivered through design guidelines, heuristics, frameworks, and recommendations, in addition to the two case studies to help guide future tabletop system creators

Understanding Public Evaluation: Quantifying Experimenter Intervention

Public evaluations are popular because some research questions can only be answered by turning “to the wild.” Different approaches place experimenters in different roles during deployment, which has implications for the kinds of data that can be collected and the potential bias introduced by the experimenter. This paper expands our understanding of how experimenter roles impact public evaluations and provides an empirical basis to consider different evaluation approaches. We completed an evaluation of a playful gesture-controlled display – not to understand interaction at the display but to compare different evaluation approaches. The conditions placed the experimenter in three roles, steward observer, overt observer, and covert observer, to measure the effect of experimenter presence and analyse the strengths and weaknesses of each approach

‘Enhancing natural beauty’ or ‘poems thrust in my face’?: perceptions of artworks in ‘wild’ landscape settings

What role can (or should) artworks play in non-urban landscapes, particularly those perceived as ‘wild’? Conceptions of natural landscapes are a part of cultural discourse, and consequently artworks can both reflect and affect concepts of wilderness. Site-specific artworks situated in remote settings offer particular opportunities for interpreting relationships between culture and nature, time and place, and can communicate a range of environmental and social values. However, art can be controversial, and artworks in protected and sensitive landscapes more so. How does a contemporary cultural artefact impact the experience and understanding of ‘wild’ landscapes, especially if the people drawn to such landscapes value their timeless and non-human qualities? Can cultural expressions and wild places co-exist? To explore these tensions, this paper focuses on the role of art in UK national parks, as evidenced through parks policies and a case study project. An overview of existing policy nationwide illustrates varying approaches to this aspect of landscape interpretation and management, with the amount of work occurring ‘on the ground’ differing from park to park. Within this context, the Peak District National Park supported Companion Stones (2010, project leader Charles Monkhouse), a series of poem-inscribed stone sculptures situated in more and less remote parts of the Park. Interviews with project artists, cultural heritage and parks managers, on-site surveys of fifty park users (in 2012 and 2013) and other commentary such as reviews were analysed to trace the different values being promoted through Companion Stones , and to assess how these values are perceived by different stakeholders. The study revealed a generally supportive or neutral attitude toward Companion Stones and the extra dimension they add to landscape experience and understanding, but a number of important exceptions highlighting the significance of siting, materiality, form and scale. Perceptions of the appropriateness / inappropriateness of artworks in wild landscapes are illustrative of wider concerns about landscape management and change. Understanding these perceptions can inform policymakers and artists as they seek to achieve the national parks aim of ‘Promot[ing] public understanding and enjoyment of their special qualities’, especially when those landscape qualities are both cultural and ‘wild’

"I need a better description'': An Investigation Into User Expectations For Differential Privacy

Despite recent widespread deployment of differential privacy, relatively little is known about what users think of differential privacy. In this work, we seek to explore users' privacy expectations related to differential privacy. Specifically, we investigate (1) whether users care about the protections afforded by differential privacy, and (2) whether they are therefore more willing to share their data with differentially private systems. Further, we attempt to understand (3) users' privacy expectations of the differentially private systems they may encounter in practice and (4) their willingness to share data in such systems. To answer these questions, we use a series of rigorously conducted surveys (n=2424). We find that users care about the kinds of information leaks against which differential privacy protects and are more willing to share their private information when the risks of these leaks are less likely to happen. Additionally, we find that the ways in which differential privacy is described in-the-wild haphazardly set users' privacy expectations, which can be misleading depending on the deployment. We synthesize our results into a framework for understanding a user's willingness to share information with differentially private systems, which takes into account the interaction between the user's prior privacy concerns and how differential privacy is described

Microscope and spectacle : on the complexities of using new visual technologies to communicate about wildlife conservation

Acknowledgments We thank our interviewees for granting us access to data and permission to use images; dot.rural Digital Economy Hub, the University of Aberdeen, and the James Hutton Institute for funding and support; Gina Maffey, Tony James, Katrina Myrvang Brown, and two anonymous reviewers for their comments on earlier versions of the manuscript; and JP Vargheese for technical assistance.Peer reviewedPublisher PD

GlobalFestival: Evaluating Real World Interaction on a Spherical Display

Spherical displays present compelling opportunities for interaction in public spaces. However, there is little research into how touch interaction should control a spherical surface or how these displays are used in real world settings. This paper presents an in the wild deployment of an application for a spherical display called GlobalFestival that utilises two different touch interaction techniques. The first version of the application allows users to spin and tilt content on the display, while the second version only allows spinning the content. During the 4-day deployment, we collected overhead video data and on-display interaction logs. The analysis brings together quantitative and qualitative methods to understand how users approach and move around the display, how on screen interaction compares in the two versions of the application, and how the display supports social interaction given its novel form factor

Emotions in context: examining pervasive affective sensing systems, applications, and analyses

Pervasive sensing has opened up new opportunities for measuring our feelings and understanding our behavior by monitoring our affective states while mobile. This review paper surveys pervasive affect sensing by examining and considering three major elements of affective pervasive systems, namely; “sensing”, “analysis”, and “application”. Sensing investigates the different sensing modalities that are used in existing real-time affective applications, Analysis explores different approaches to emotion recognition and visualization based on different types of collected data, and Application investigates different leading areas of affective applications. For each of the three aspects, the paper includes an extensive survey of the literature and finally outlines some of challenges and future research opportunities of affective sensing in the context of pervasive computing

Deep Cover HCI

The growing popularity of methodologies that turn "to the wild" for real world data creates new ethical issues for the HCI community. For investigations questioning interactions in public or transient spaces, crowd interaction, or natural behaviour, uncontrolled and uninfluenced (by the experimenter) experiences represent the ideal evaluation environment. We argue that covert research can be completed rigorously and ethically to expand our knowledge of ubiquitous technologies. Our approach, which we call Deep Cover HCI, utilises technology-supported observation in public spaces to stage completely undisturbed experiences for evaluation. We complete studies without informed consent and without intervention from an experimenter in order to gain new insights into how people use technology in public settings. We argue there is clear value in this approach, reflect on the ethical issues of such investigations, and describe our ethical guidelines for completing Deep Cover HCI Research