Factors influencing visual attention switch in multi-display user interfaces: a survey

Multi-display User Interfaces (MDUIs) enable people to take advantage of the different characteristics of different display categories. For example, combining mobile and large displays within the same system enables users to interact with user interface elements locally while simultaneously having a large display space to show data. Although there is a large potential gain in performance and comfort, there is at least one main drawback that can override the benefits of MDUIs: the visual and physical separation between displays requires that users perform visual attention switches between displays. In this paper, we present a survey and analysis of existing data and classifications to identify factors that can affect visual attention switch in MDUIs. Our analysis and taxonomy bring attention to the often ignored implications of visual attention switch and collect existing evidence to facilitate research and implementation of effective MDUIs.Postprin

Children’s Creativity Lab : creating a ‘pen of the future’

This work is funded by EPSRC and SICSA.Technology is changing the way we acquire new skills and proficiencies and handwriting is no exception to this. However, while some technological advancements exist in this area, the question of how we can digitally enhance the process of learning handwriting remains under-explored. Being immersed in this process on an everyday basis, we believe that school aged children can provide valuable ideas and insights into the design of future writing tools for learners developing their (hand)writing skills. As end-users of the proposed technology, we explore including children in a form of informed participatory design during a creativity lab where we invited 12 children, aged 11–12, to put themselves into the shoes of a product designers and create a Pen of the Future using prototyping materials. In this paper we describe our methodology and discuss the design ideas that children came up with and how these may inform the design of future writing tools.Postprin

End-user development in social psychology research:Factors for adoption

Psychology researchers employ the Experience Sampling Method (ESM) to capture thoughts and behaviours of participants within their everyday lives. Smartphone-based ESM apps are increasingly used in such research. However, the diversity of researchers' app requirements, coupled with cost and complexity of their implementation, has prompted end-user development (EUD) approaches. In addition, limited evaluation of such environments beyond lab-based usability studies precludes discovery of factors pertaining to real-world EUD adoption.We first describe the extension of Jeeves, our visual programming environment for ESM app creation, in which we implemented additional functional requirements, derived from a survey and analysis of previous work. We further describe interviews with psychology researchers to understand their practical considerations for employing this extended environment in their work practices. Results of our analysis are presented as factors pertaining to the adoption of EUD activities within and between communities of practice.Postprin

Overcoming mental blocks:A blocks-based approach to experience sampling studies

Experience Sampling Method (ESM) studies repeatedly survey participants on their behaviours and experiences as they go about their everyday lives. Smartphones afford an ideal platform for ESM study applications as devices seldom leave their users, and can automatically sense surrounding context to augment subjective survey responses. ESM studies are employed in fields such as psychology and social science where researchers are not necessarily programmers and require tools for application creation. Previous tools using web forms, text files, or flowchart paradigms are either insufficient to model the potential complexity of study protocols, or fail to provide a low threshold to entry. We demonstrate that blocks programming simultaneously lowers the barriers to creating simple study protocols, while enabling the creation of increasingly sophisticated protocols. We discuss the design of Jeeves, our blocks-based environment for ESM studies, and explain advantages that blocks afford in ESM study design.Postprin

TAPping into mental models with blocks

Trigger-Action Programming (TAP) has been shown to support end-users' rule-based mental models of context-aware applications. However, when desired behaviours increase in complexity, this can lead to ambiguity that confuses events, states, and how they can be combined in meaningful ways. Blocks programming could provide a solution, through constrained editing of visual triggers, conditions and actions. We observed slips and mistakes by users performing TAP with Jeeves, our domain-specific blocks environment, and propose solutions.Postprin

Jeeves - A visual programming environment for mobile experience sampling

The Experience Sampling Method (ESM) captures participants’ thoughts and feelings in their everyday environments. Mobile and wearable technologies afford us opportunities to reach people using ESM in varying contexts. However, a lack of programming knowledge often hinders researchers in creating ESM applications. In practice, they rely on specialised tools for app creation. Our initial review of these tools indicates that most are expensive commercial services, and none utilise the full potential of sensors for creating context-aware applications. We present “Jeeves”, a visual language to facilitate ESM application creation. Inspired by successful visual languages in literature, our block-based notation enables researchers to visually construct ESM study specifications. We demonstrate its applicability by replicating existing ESM studies found in medical and psychology literature. Our preliminary study with 20 participants demonstrates that both non-programmers and programmers are able to successfully utilise Jeeves. We discuss future work in extending Jeeves with alternative mobile technologies.PostprintPeer reviewe

Jeeves - an Experience Sampling study creation tool

Ubiquitous mobile technology affords clinicians new opportunities to enhance personalised, patient-centric care remotely, easing the burden on both patient and clinician. The Experience Sampling Method (ESM) involves the repeated assessment of patients on their symptoms or behaviours, and their external contexts, as they go about their everyday lives, enhancing ecological validity and minimising recall bias. While previously conducted with paper diaries, ESM smartphone applications are now being employed, that have a range of benefits over paper-based methods including the ability to scale to many more patients. However, development of such applications is time-consuming and requires considerable programming knowledge. This has prompted the development of ESM creation tools that alleviate a researcher from the burden of programming an ESM application from scratch. This paper presents our work on Jeeves, a visual environment for creating secure ESM Android applications, and a usability evaluation we conducted with health psychology students.Postprin

Change Blindness in Proximity-Aware Mobile Interfaces

Interface designs on both small and large displays can encourage people to alter their physical distance to the display. Mobile devices support this form of interaction naturally, as the user can move the device closer or further away as needed. The current generation of mobile devices can employ computer vision, depth sensing and other inference methods to determine the distance between the user and the display. Once this distance is known, a system can adapt the rendering of display content accordingly and enable proximity-aware mobile interfaces. The dominant method of exploiting proximity-aware interfaces is to remove or superimpose visual information. In this paper, we investigate change blindness in such interfaces. We present the results of two experiments. In our first experiment we show that a proximity-aware mobile interface results in significantly more change blindness errors than a non-moving interface. The absolute difference in error rates was 13.7%. In our second experiment we show that within a proximity-aware mobile interface, gradual changes induce significantly more change blindness errors than instant changes— confirming expected change blindness behavior. Based on our results we discuss the implications of either exploiting change blindness effects or mitigating them when designing mobile proximity-aware interfaces

End-User Development of Experience Sampling Smartphone Apps - Recommendations and Requirements

Professional programmers are significantly outnumbered by end-users of software, making it problematic to predict the diverse, dynamic needs of these users in advance. An end-user development (EUD) approach, supporting the creation and modification of software independent of professional developers, is one potential solution. EUD activities are applicable to the work practices of psychology researchers and clinicians, who increasingly rely on software for assessment of participants and patients, but must also depend on developers to realise their requirements. In practice, however, the adoption of EUD technology by these two end-user groups is contingent on various contextual factors that are not well understood. In this paper, we therefore establish recommendations for the design of EUD tools allowing non-programmers to develop apps to collect data from participants in their everyday lives, known as "experience sampling" apps. We first present interviews conducted with psychology researchers and practising clinicians on their current working practices and motivation to adopt EUD tools. We then describe our observation of a chronic disease management clinic. Finally, we describe three case studies of psychology researchers using our EUD tool Jeeves to undertake experience sampling studies, and synthesise recommendations and requirements for tools allowing the EUD of experience sampling apps

Imposing Hierarchy on a Graph

This paper investigates a way of imposing a hierarchy on a graph in order to explore relationships between elements of data. Imposing a hierarchy is equivalent to clustering. First a tree structure is imposed on the initial graph, then a k-partite structure is imposed on each previously obtained cluster. Imposing a tree exposes the hierarchical structure of the graph as well as providing an abstraction of the data. In this study three kinds of merge operations are considered and their composition is shown to yield a tree with a maximal number of vertices in which vertices in the tree are associated with disjoint connected subgraphs. These subgraphs are subsequently transformed into k-partite graphs using similar merge operations. These merges also ensure that the obtained tree is proper with respect to the hierarchy imposed on the data. A detailed example of the techniqueâs application in exposing the structure of protein interaction networks is described. The example focuses on the MAPK cell signalling pathway. The merge operations help expose where signal regulation occurs within the pathway and from other signalling pathways within the cell