Framework for Electroencephalography-based Evaluation of User Experience

Measuring brain activity with electroencephalography (EEG) is mature enough to assess mental states. Combined with existing methods, such tool can be used to strengthen the understanding of user experience. We contribute a set of methods to estimate continuously the user's mental workload, attention and recognition of interaction errors during different interaction tasks. We validate these measures on a controlled virtual environment and show how they can be used to compare different interaction techniques or devices, by comparing here a keyboard and a touch-based interface. Thanks to such a framework, EEG becomes a promising method to improve the overall usability of complex computer systems.Comment: in ACM. CHI '16 - SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing System, May 2016, San Jose, United State

No access, no knowledge, or no interest? Examining use and non-use of assistive technologies

ABSTRACT Assistive technologies can evoke both positive and negative sentiments from users. However, much of the current literature focuses only on adoption, use, and abandonment of assistive technologies, and provides only surface-level explanations for volitional non-use. We summarize a current project that has revealed valuable insights about non-use of assistive technologies by people with visual impairments in the developing world, and discuss some of the difficulties that arise when trying to recruit non-users of assistive technology

Increasing the Reach of Snowball Sampling: The Impact of Fixed versus Lottery Incentives

ABSTRACT Though many researchers have studied how to incentivize people to respond to surveys, little is known about how these incentives impact respondents' willingness to recruit others to participate as well. In this paper, we show that the incentives offered for individual survey responses can have a dramatic impact on the overall reach of a survey through a network of peers. In a field experiment in India, we made a survey accessible via mobile phones and offered respondents either a fixed incentive (guaranteed payment of about $0.17) or a lottery incentive (1$17). When asked to choose, a significant fraction of respondents preferred the lottery incentive. However, when encouraged to spread the survey, the fixed incentive spread over 100 times further, reaching about 800 people in a day. We interpret this surprising result and discuss the implications for HCI

An analysis of screen reader use in India

We present the results of two surveys and a qualitative interview-based study with users of screen readers in India. Our early interviews moved us in the direction of examining patterns that differentiate users of two particular software applications -- the dominant market standard JAWS and the free, open source challenger NVDA. A comparison between the two is timely and particularly relevant to issues elsewhere in the developing world. In the short term, the question of choosing one application over another could be based on price and support for custom-made applications, but in the long term, issues of language support are likely to be of concern as well. We explore software adoption behavior and present results that show the relationship between the quality of audio and peoples' willingness to use one software over another. We also compare the switch from JAWS to NVDA to other kinds of switches from dominant software to open source options. In conclusion, we discuss the business aspects of screen readers and examine why the comparison between these two applications is particularly important in the discussion on accessible personal computing for people with vision impairments in the developing world.Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/95718/1/McCarthy-Pal-Cutrell-ScreenReaders.pd

Understanding Blind People's Experiences with Computer-Generated Captions of Social Media Images

ABSTRACT Research advancements allow computational systems to automatically caption social media images. Often, these captions are evaluated with sighted humans using the image as a reference. Here, we explore how blind and visually impaired people experience these captions in two studies about social media images. Using a contextual inquiry approach (n=6 blind/visually impaired), we found that blind people place a lot of trust in automatically generated captions, filling in details to resolve differences between an image's context and an incongruent caption. We built on this in-person study with a second, larger online experiment (n=100 blind/visually impaired) to investigate the role of phrasing in encouraging trust or skepticism in captions. We found that captions emphasizing the probability of error, rather than correctness, encouraged people to attribute incongruence to an incorrect caption, rather than missing details. Where existing research has focused on encouraging trust in intelligent systems, we conclude by challenging this assumption and consider the benefits of encouraging appropriate skepticism

PokeME: Applying context-driven notifications to increase worker engagement in mobile crowd-sourcing

National Research Foundation (NRF) Singapore under International Research Centres in Singapore Funding Initiativ

Beyond “yesterday’s tomorrow”: future-focused mobile interaction design by and for emergent users

Mobile and ubiquitous computing researchers have long envisioned future worlds for users in developed regions. Steered by such visions, they have innovated devices and services exploring the value of alternative propositions with and for individuals, groups and communities. Meanwhile, such radical and long-term explorations are uncommon for what have been termed emergent users; users, that is, for whom advanced technologies are just within grasp. Rather, a driving assumption is that today’s high-end mobile technologies will “trickle down” to these user groups in due course. In this paper, we open the debate about what mobile technologies might be like if emergent users were directly involved in creating their visions for the future 5–10 years from now. To do this, we report on a set of envisioning workshops in India, South Africa and Kenya that provide a roadmap for valued, effective devices and services for these regions in the next decade. © 2016, The Author(s)

Decoding auditory and tactile attention for use in an EEG-based brain-computer interface

International audienceBrain-computer interface (BCI) systems offer a non-verbal and covert way for humans to interact with a machine. They are designed to interpret a user's brain state that can be translated into action or for other communication purposes. This study investigates the feasibility of developing a hands-and eyes-free BCI system based on auditory and tactile attention. Users were presented with multiple simultaneous streams of auditory or tactile stimuli, and were directed to detect a pattern in one particular stream. We applied a linear classifier to decode the stream-tracking attention from the EEG signal. The results showed that the proposed BCI system could capture attention from most study participants using multisensory inputs, and showed potential in transfer learning across multiple sessions

Supporting Self-Regulation of Children with ADHD Using Wearables: Tensions and Design Challenges

The design of wearable applications supporting children with Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorders (ADHD) requires a deep understanding not only of what is possible from a clinical standpoint but also how the children might understand and orient towards wearable technologies, such as a smartwatch. Through a series of participatory design workshops with children with ADHD and their caregivers, we identified tensions and challenges in designing wearable applications supporting the self-regulation of children with ADHD. In this paper, we describe the specific challenges of smartwatches for this population, the balance between self-regulation and co-regulation, and tensions when receiving notifications on a smartwatch in various contexts. These results indicate key considerations—from both the child and caregiver viewpoints—for designing technological interventions supporting children with ADHD