Quantifying diversity in user experience

Evaluation should be integral to any design activity. Evaluation in innovative product development practices however is highly complicated. It often needs to be applied to immature prototypes, while at the same time users’ responses may greatly vary across different individuals and situations. This thesis has focused on methods and tools for inquiring into users’ experiences with interactive products. More specifically, it had three objectives: a) to conceptualize the notion of diversity in subjective judgments of users’ experiences with interactive products, b) to establish empirical evidence for the prevalence of diversity, and c) to provide a number of methodological tools for the study of diversity in the context of product development. Two critical sources of diversity in the context of users’ experiences with interactive products were identified and respective methodological solutions were proposed: a) understanding interpersonal diversity through personal attribute judgments, and b) understanding the dynamics of experience through experience narratives. Personal Attribute Judgments, and in particular, the Repertory Grid Technique, is proposed as an alternative to standardized psychometric scales, in measuring users’ responses to artifacts in the context of parallel design. It is argued that traditional approaches that rely on the a-priori definition of the measures by the researchers have at least two limitations. First, such approaches are inherently limited as researchers might fail to consider a given dimension as relevant for the given product and context, or they might simply lack validated measurement scales for a relevant dimension. Secondly, such approaches assume that participants are able to interpret and position a given statement that is defined by the researcher to their own context. Recent literature has challenged this assumption, suggesting that in certain cases participants are unable to interpret the personal relevance of the statement in their own context, and might instead employ shallow processing, that is respond to surface features of the language rather than attaching personal relevance to the question. In contrast, personal attributes are elicited from each individual respondent, instead of being a-priori imposed by the experimenter, and thus are supposed to be highly relevant to the individual. However, personal attributes require substantially more complex quantitative analysis procedures. It is illustrated that traditional analysis procedures fail to bring out the richness of the personal attribute judgments and two new Multi-Dimensional Scaling procedures that extract multiple complementary views from such datasets are proposed. An alternative approach for the measurement of the dynamics of experience over time is proposed that relies on a) the retrospective elicitation of idiosyncratic selfreports of one’s experiences with a product, the so-called experience narratives, and b) the extraction of generalized knowledge from these narratives through computational content analysis techniques. iScale, a tool that aims at increasing users’ accuracy and effectiveness in recalling their experiences with a product is proposed. iScale uses sketching in imposing a structured process in the reconstruction of one’s experiences from memory. Two different versions of iScale, each grounded in a distinct theory of how people reconstruct emotional experiences from memory, were developed and empirically tested. A computational approach for the extraction of generalized knowledge from experience narratives, that combines traditional coding procedures with computational approaches for assessing the semantic similarity between documents, is proposed and compared with traditional content analysis. Through these two methodological contributions, this thesis argues against averaging in the subjective evaluation of interactive products. It proposes the development of interactive tools that can assist designers in moving across multiple levels of abstractions of empirical data, as design-relevant knowledge might be found on all these levels

Citizen motivation on the go: the role of psychological empowerment

Although advances in technology now enable people to communicate ‘anytime, anyplace’, it is not clear how citizens can be motivated to actually do so. This paper evaluates the impact of three principles of psychological empowerment, namely perceived self-efficacy, sense of community and causal importance, on public transport passengers’ motivation to report issues and complaints while on the move. A week-long study with 65 participants revealed that self-efficacy and causal importance increased participation in short bursts and increased perceptions of service quality over longer periods. Finally, we discuss the implications of these findings for citizen participation projects and reflect on design opportunities for mobile technologies that motivate citizen participation.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

ICTD Work, Plus mFeel : improving communication in resource-poor settings

This issue's Works-In-Progress department has four entries related to the issue's theme, Information and Communication Technologies for Development (ICTD). They are “Sustainable ICT in Agricultural Value Chains”, “Measuring Social Inclusion in Primary Schools”, “An Architecture for Green Mobile Computation”, and “Improving Communication in Resource-Poor Settings”. A fifth entry, “mFeel: An Affective Mobile System”, covers the mFeel mobile system, which combines context awareness with affective and cognitive techniques

Supporting the consumption and co-authoring of locative media experiences for a rural village community: design and field trial evaluation of the SHARC2.0 framework

Locative Media Experiences (LMEs) have significant potential in enabling visitors to engage with the places that they visit through an appreciation of local history. For example, a visitor to Berlin that is exploring remnants of the Berlin Wall may be encouraged to appreciate (or in part experience) the falling of the Berlin wall by consuming multimedia directly related to her current location such as listening to audio recordings of the assembled crowds on 10th November 1989. However, despite the growing popularity of enabling technologies (such as GPS-equipped smart phones and tablets), the availability of tools that support the authoring of LMEs is limited. In addition, mobile apps that support the consumption of LMEs typically adopt an approach that precludes users from being able to respond with their own multimedia contributions. In this article we describe the design and evaluation of the SHARC2.0 framework that has been developed as part of our long-term and participatory engagement with the rural village of Wray in the north of England. Wray has very limited cellular data coverage which has placed a requirement on the framework and associated tools to operate without reliance on network connectivity. A field study is presented which featured a LME relating to Wray’s local history and which contained multimedia content contributed by members of the community including historic photos (taken from an existing ‘Digital Noticeboard’ system), audio-clips (from a local historian and village residents) and video (contributed during a design workshop). The novelty of our approach relates to the ability of multiple authors to contribute to a LME in-situ, and the utilisation of personal cloud storage for storing the contents associated with a multi-authored LME

Improving Working Conditions to Promote Worker Safety, Health and Wellbeing for Low-Wage Workers: The Workplace Organizational Health Study

This paper addresses a significant gap in the literature by describing a study that tests the feasibility and efficacy of an organizational intervention to improve working conditions, safety, and wellbeing for low-wage food service workers. The Workplace Organizational Health Study tests the hypothesis that an intervention targeting the work organization and environment will result in improvements in workers’ musculoskeletal disorders and wellbeing. This ongoing study is being conducted in collaboration with a large food service company. Formative evaluation was used to prioritize outcomes, assess working conditions, and define essential intervention elements. The theory-driven intervention is being evaluated in a proof-of-concept trial, conducted to demonstrate feasibility and potential efficacy using a cluster randomized design. Ten worksites were randomly assigned to intervention or control conditions. The 13-month intervention uses a comprehensive systems approach to improve workplace policies and practices. Using principles of participatory engagement, the intervention targets safety and ergonomics; work intensity; and job enrichment. The evaluation will provide a preliminary assessment of estimates of the intervention effect on targeted outcomes and inform understanding of the intervention implementation across worksites. This study is expected to provide insights on methods to improve working conditions in support of the safety and wellbeing of low-wage workers