Wellbeing at Work: Four Perspectives on What User Experiences with Artifacts May Contribute

Part 2: User Experiences and Wellbeing at Work (UX@Work)International audienceMost work involves the use of artifacts; thus, user experience (UX) is a factor in how most employees experience their work. This study revisits the tool, media, dialogue-partner, and system perspectives on artifact use to explore how UX may contribute to wellbeing at work. It is found that artifacts foster positive UX when they lend the user expressive power (tool), are transparent (media) or perceptive (dialogue partner).They foster negative UX when they break the user’s task focus or make the user a mere system component. These findings are discussed and refined by elaborating the classic concepts of ready to hand and present at hand

Capturing in-situ Feelings and Experiences of Public Transit Riders Using Smartphones

High-density urban environments are susceptible to ever-growing traffic congestion issues, which speaks to the importance of implementing and maintaining effective and sustainable transportation networks. While transit oriented developments offer the potential to help mitigate traffic congestion issues, transit networks ought to be safe and reliable for ideal transit-user communities. As such, it is imperative to capture meaningful data regarding transit experiences, and deduce how transit networks can be enhanced or modified to continually maintain ideal transit experiences. Historically speaking, it has been relatively tricky to measure how people feel whilst using public transportation, without leaning on recall memory to explain such phenomena. Recall memory can be vague and is often less detailed than recording in-situ observations of the transit-user community. This thesis explores the feasibility of using smartphones to capture meaningful in-situ data to leverage the benefits of the Experience Sampling Method (ESM), while also addressing some limitations. Students travelled along Grand River Transit bus routes in Waterloo, Ontario from Wilfrid Laurier University to Conestoga Mall and back using alternate routes. The mobile survey captured qualitative and quantitative data from 145 students to explore variations in wellbeing, and the extent to which environmental variables can influence transit experiences. There were many findings to consider for future research, especially the overall role anxiety played on transit experiences. In addition, the results indicate that the methodology is appropriate for further research, and can be applied to a wide range of research topics. In particular, it is recommended that a similar study be applied to a much larger, and more representative sample of the transit-user community. Future considerations are discussed as key considerations to leverage the benefits of ESM research, and the promise it can bring towards the enhancement of transit experiences and the cohesion of transit-user communities

Sense-making of consumer wellbeing in information technology-enabled services from a relational ontology position

Information technology (IT) built into products and services have become the key drivers for service innovation. How information technology-enabled services (ITESs) affect consumer wellbeing has increasingly become a concern to service scholars. In response to this, transformative service research (TSR) has emerged as a new stream in service research. This paper investigates consumer wellbeing derived from the consumption of ITESs in consumers’ daily lives. A mixed-method approach was employed in our study, including self-reflective reports, in-depth interviews and visual artistic methods. We demonstrated that a relational ontology, drawing on the ‘focal things’ concept (Borgmann, 1984) and sociomateriality (Orlikowski, 2009), could be used as a lens for us to understand consumer wellbeing in ITESs. We used four vignettes to demonstrate how relational ontology can enhance our understanding of consumer wellbeing in ITESs. Theoretically, this paper contributes to TSR by proposing and demonstrating the need to shift or at least extend the extant predominant technology ontology in marketing literature to make sense of consumer experiences and wellbeing in ITESs. In practice, this research encourages ITESs designers to emphasise the relational entanglement of technology with consumer routine practices in their service innovations for the purposes of consumer wellbeing

Resonating Experiences of Self and Others enabled by a Tangible Somaesthetic Design

Digitalization is penetrating every aspect of everyday life including a human's heart beating, which can easily be sensed by wearable sensors and displayed for others to see, feel, and potentially "bodily resonate" with. Previous work in studying human interactions and interaction designs with physiological data, such as a heart's pulse rate, have argued that feeding it back to the users may, for example support users' mindfulness and self-awareness during various everyday activities and ultimately support their wellbeing. Inspired by Somaesthetics as a discipline, which focuses on an appreciation of the living body's role in all our experiences, we designed and explored mobile tangible heart beat displays, which enable rich forms of bodily experiencing oneself and others in social proximity. In this paper, we first report on the design process of tangible heart displays and then present results of a field study with 30 pairs of participants. Participants were asked to use the tangible heart displays during watching movies together and report their experience in three different heart display conditions (i.e., displaying their own heart beat, their partner's heart beat, and watching a movie without a heart display). We found, for example that participants reported significant effects in experiencing sensory immersion when they felt their own heart beats compared to the condition without any heart beat display, and that feeling their partner's heart beats resulted in significant effects on social experience. We refer to resonance theory to discuss the results, highlighting the potential of how ubiquitous technology could utilize physiological data to provide resonance in a modern society facing social acceleration.Comment: 18 page

Nothing About Us Without Us: Combining Professional Knowledge with Service User Experience in Training about Mental Health and Learning Disabilities

Recent policy documents relating to people with learning disabilities have proposed that they be more fully included in generic mental health care provision. In practice such inclusion has been slow to proceed, hampered by factors which appear to include lack of knowledge and confidence on the part of generic mental health practitioners. Policy documents have also recommended training of practitioners by people with learning disabilities, which has been found to impact positively on confidence and attitudes. This study reports on a training session delivered to ‘Improving Access to Psychological Therapies’ practitioners by a service user with learning disabilities who has accessed mental health services, together with a clinical psychologist and an honorary assistant psychologist. The practitioners were asked to rate their knowledge about and confidence in working with people with learning disabilities before and after the training. Participants rated themselves as having significantly greater knowledge and confidence following the training, and many of the qualitative reasons given for these changes mentioned the contribution of the service user. This paper includes details of her particular contribution to the training, together with her reflections on the experience of joint training, given in an interview with the assistant psychologist. It is concluded that joint training needs to be developed and its impact further researched

Influences on the Uptake of and Engagement With Health and Well-Being Smartphone Apps: Systematic Review

Background: The public health impact of health and well-being digital interventions is dependent upon sufficient real-world uptake and engagement. Uptake is currently largely dependent on popularity indicators (eg, ranking and user ratings on app stores), which may not correspond with effectiveness, and rapid disengagement is common. Therefore, there is an urgent need to identify factors that influence uptake and engagement with health and well-being apps to inform new approaches that promote the effective use of such tools. Objective: This review aimed to understand what is known about influences on the uptake of and engagement with health and well-being smartphone apps among adults. Methods: We conducted a systematic review of quantitative, qualitative, and mixed methods studies. Studies conducted on adults were included if they focused on health and well-being smartphone apps reporting on uptake and engagement behavior. Studies identified through a systematic search in Medical Literature Analysis and Retrieval System Online, or MEDLARS Online (MEDLINE), EMBASE, Cumulative Index to Nursing and Allied Health Literature (CINAHL), PsychINFO, Scopus, Cochrane library databases, DataBase systems and Logic Programming (DBLP), and Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) Digital library were screened, with a proportion screened independently by 2 authors. Data synthesis and interpretation were undertaken using a deductive iterative process. External validity checking was undertaken by an independent researcher. A narrative synthesis of the findings was structured around the components of the capability, opportunity, motivation, behavior change model and the theoretical domains framework (TDF). Results: Of the 7640 identified studies, 41 were included in the review. Factors related to uptake (U), engagement (E), or both (B) were identified. Under capability, the main factors identified were app literacy skills (B), app awareness (U), available user guidance (B), health information (E), statistical information on progress (E), well-designed reminders (E), features to reduce cognitive load (E), and self-monitoring features (E). Availability at low cost (U), positive tone, and personalization (E) were identified as physical opportunity factors, whereas recommendations for health and well-being apps (U), embedded health professional support (E), and social networking (E) possibilities were social opportunity factors. Finally, the motivation factors included positive feedback (E), available rewards (E), goal setting (E), and the perceived utility of the app (E). Conclusions: Across a wide range of populations and behaviors, 26 factors relating to capability, opportunity, and motivation appear to influence the uptake of and engagement with health and well-being smartphone apps. Our recommendations may help app developers, health app portal developers, and policy makers in the optimization of health and well-being apps

Turning Point Scotland's Housing First Project Evaluation: Final Report

GIS maps are one kind of complex display in which people search for targets. Recent studies have shown that the choice of colour-scales when displaying these maps has important implications for people's strategies in searching these displays (Donnelly, Cave, Welland & Menneer, 2006). The current study follows up on this research. Observers searched for multiple targets in each display. Two targets were red and two were blue, and targets were not very salient. Observers searched until all targets were found. This often took several seconds and many fixations. The order in hich observers found targets suggested that they were more reliant on search for particular colours under some color-scales than under others. What will be presented here is a number of oculomotor measures used to explore how search was guided in the displays: the degree to which fixations clustered around targets, the image characteristics of regions of the display that were fixated, and goodness of fit to fixation distributions of Itti & Koch saliency maps, where the features used to compute saliency were varied. The goal was to see which measures would best pick up on differences in what guided search through complex display