Poking fun at the surface: exploring touch-point overloading on the multi-touch tabletop with child users

In this paper a collaborative game for children is used to explore touch-point overloading on a multi-touch tabletop. Understanding the occurrence of new interactional limitations, such as the situation of touch-point overloading in a multi-touch interface, is highly relevant for interaction designers working with emerging technologies. The game was designed for the Microsoft Surface 1.0 and during gameplay the number of simultaneous touch-points required gradually increases to beyond the physical capacity of the users. Studies were carried out involving a total of 42 children (from 2 different age groups) playing in groups of between 5-7 and all interactions were logged. From quantitative analysis of the interactions occurring during the game and observations made we explore the impact of overloading and identify other salient findings. This paper also highlights the need for empirical evaluation of the physical and cognitive limitations of interaction with emerging technologies

Supporting the Mobile In-situ Authoring of Locative Media in Rural Places: Design and Expert Evaluation of the SMAT app

Providing users with carefully authored Locative media experiences (which can be consumed via their GPS equipped smartphones or tablets) has significant potential for fostering a strong engagement with their current surroundings. However, the availability of mobile tools to support the authoring of locative media experiences in-situ, and by non-technical users, remains scarce. In this article we present the design and field-trial expert evaluation of a mobile app developed under the SHARC project (Investigating Technology Support for the Shared Curation of Local History in a Rural Community). The app is named SMAT (SHARC Mobile Authoring Tool) and supports the authoring of Locative Media experiences with a focus on the creation of POIs (Points of Interest) and associated geo-fences which trigger the pushed delivery of media items such as photos, audio clips, etc. One important requirement of SMAT is the ability to support authoring in places where connectivity is intermittent or unavailable, e.g. many rural areas

"Working with Teenagers within HCI Research: Understanding Teen-Computer Interaction"

There has been limited consideration of teenagers (defined as 12-19 year olds in this work) as participants and end-users in Child-Computer Interaction and mainstream HCI communities. Teenagers reside in a fascinating and dynamic space between childhood and adulthood, and working more closely with teenagers within HCI may bring great insights and benefits. This paper provides an overview of teenage development from a psychological perspective, and then reviews existing work considering teenagers within HCI. Teenagers have long been identified as unique and studied within the field of developmental psychology, and the overview we provide in this paper highlights key understandings that should be carefully considered when working with teen participants. The paper concludes by presenting a set of key research questions that need to be explored in order to effectively work with teenagers within the field of HCI and provide a roadmap for future research within the Teen-Computer Interaction area

Constructing the Cool Wall: A Tool to Explore Teen Meanings of Cool

This paper describes the development and exploration of a tool designed to assist in investigating ‘cool’ as it applies to the design of interactive products for teenagers. The method involved the derivation of theoretical understandings of cool from literature that resulted in identification of seven core categories for cool, which were mapped to a hierarchy. The hierarchy includes having of cool things, the doing of cool activities and the being of cool. This paper focuses on a tool, the Cool Wall, developed to explore one specific facet of the hierarchy; exploring shared understanding of having cool things. The paper describes the development and construction of the tool, using a heavily participatory approach, and the results and analysis of a study carried out over 2 days in a school in the UK. The results of the study both provide clear insights into cool things and enable a refined understanding of cool in this context. Two additional studies are then used to identify potential shortcomings in the Cool Wall methodology. In the first study participants were able to populate a paper cool wall with anything they chose, this revealed two potential new categories of images and that the current set of images covered the majority of key themes. In the second study teenagers interpretations of the meaning of the images included in the Cool Wall were explored, this showed that the majority of meanings were as expected and a small number of unexpected interpretations provided some valuable insights

Designing Teenage Emotions with a Life of Their Own

In this chapter, two participatory design activities are described in which teenagers create lo-fi designs describing emotions and explain the rationale for their design choices. Designs annotating and describing emotions are categorised as anthropomorphic, abstract, object based, or biomorphic. The chapter concludes: (i) teenagers use a variety of visual metaphors to describe emotions, (ii) teenagers use anthropomorphic visual metaphors most often to describe emotions and (iii) teenagers make more use of abstract and biomorphic visual metaphors to describe ‘negative’ emotions. The effect of materials on designs is analysed, suggesting that teenagers are more likely to create designs describing emotions featuring anthropomorphic visual metaphors when using malleable three-dimensional materials. Suggestions are made for the use of externalisation and personification as part of interactive emotion displays within affective systems. A focus group evaluation of a prototype mobile app is described, which suggests that teenagers place more importance on an affective systems ability to support social relationships than they do its ability to support psychological development. This research will be of value to interaction designers and Child-Computer Interaction researchers seeking to understand how teenagers use different visual metaphors to describe different emotions

Exploring the Design of Pay-Per-Use Objects in the Construction Domain

Equipment used in the construction domain is often hired in order to reduce cost and maintenance overhead. The cost of hire is dependent on the time period involved and does not take into account the actual use equipment has received. This paper presents our initial investigation into how physical objects augmented with sensing and communication technologies can measure use in order to enable new pay-per-use payment models for equipment hire. We also explore user interaction with pay-per-use objects via mobile devices. The user interactions that take place within our prototype scenario range from simple information access to transactions involving multiple users. This paper presents the design, implementation and evaluation of a prototype pay-per-use system motivated by a real world equipment hire scenario. We also provide insights into the various challenges introduced by supporting a pay-per-use model, including data storage and data security in addition to user interaction issues

Investigating Players’ Perceptions of Deceptive Design Practices within a 3D Gameplay Context

Deceptive design practices have been identified and studied in games but, to date, there have been no substantial explorations of deceptive design practices within 3D environments typically found in PC games. These offer a new set of affordances for interacting with the player, and game developers may be able to utilize these in order to shape gameplay experiences. The goal of this work was to explore users’ perceptions of deceptive design present in a popular free-to-play 3D game. A survey was carried out with 259 adult respondents identifying and explaining instances of deceptive design within video clips of gameplay from a popular Roblox game. Thematic analysis of the responses revealed six new categories of deceptive design pattern within a 3D gameplay context: Predatory Monetization, Default to Purchase, UI Misdirection, Emotional Interpersonal Persuasion, Physical Placement, and Narrative Obligation. Through our work we hope to highlight the use of deceptive design both within current 3D games and future 3D gaming environments. This work is particularly important as 3D and VR gaming grow in popularity alongside game publishers increasingly moving towards “freemium” monetization models for income

Understanding Instagram’s Deep Dive into Teen Mental Health

This paper considers the ‘Teen Mental Health Deep Dive’ slide set created by staff at Instagram in 2019 to present results from internal research and later released publicly along with annotations. The slide set was initially highlighted by the Wall Street Journal in an article focusing on claims within the slide set that use of Instagram was a having a negative impact on teen mental health, especially that social comparison, afforded by features central to the Instagram app, was negatively affecting the mental health of young people. Our goal within this paper was to summarise the content of the slide set from an academic perspective and consider whether the content of the slides provide any insights which are valuable to the HCI community. While the results and conclusions presented within the slides have clear limitations, they did help us identify a set of issues and areas for further investigation

Design Discovery Practices: Engaging professional design communities with Ketso

Decisions and assumptions made during design sessions, when teams are formulating their design objectives and their understanding of the problem they intend to solve, can be essential to the outcome as they fundamentally shape and direct the design of the product or service that is delivered. Current practice in these crucial design discovery activities is under-explored in the academic literature. To address that shortfall, and answer the research question of how UX practitioners approach and perform discovery, we used the Ketso workshop format to explore the design discovery process and its challenges with 12 user researchers and designers from a university and a large retail organisation. Our thematic analysis of the workshop outputs showed that practitioners valued an empirical data-led approach, where they could have confidence in the coverage and validity of the data, and achieve a shared understanding of the user research findings across the organisation. Key challenges included the mindset of stakeholders, with whom practitioners wanted deeper engagement, and constraints on time which may require HCI research to develop practical solutions

Design Thinking for Innovation. Stress Testing Human Factors in Ideation Sessions

This paper reports on a series of studies that attempt to unpick the factors that contribute to successful team ideation. Ideation is a popular, structured approach to creative thinking, where the goal is to produce many viable and innovative ideas and concepts. This is often accomplished through structured collaborative workshops that include ‘Design Thinking’ techniques and methods. The reported studies involved manipulating variables in controlled experiments with subjects (AKA ideators). The sample of ideators, were tasked with generating ideas to solve a challenge and the outcome of their work was measured by quantity and quality of output. The latter criterion was assessed by an expert panel using a standardised evaluation framework. Four variables were employed to understand idea generation success factors. These were identified as common and thus easily applied factors in typical ideation scenarios and included varying levels of participant stimulation (before sessions), presence or absence of a facilitator, application of ‘Design Thinking’ technique (or not) and lastly, participant profile based on professional background. In this case, participant characteristics were split between designers and non-designers. The different experiments were run, with participants generating ideas in a timeboxed activity in which their outputs were assessed against the various experimental conditions. The findings suggest that counter orthodox thinking, applying the methods (e.g. Round Robin) is less effective than the influence of ideators’ differing professional background and their level of stimulation. These conclusions in turn suggest the possibility of extending the effectiveness of workshop facilitation to increase efficiency and quality of output. The paper concludes with pointers on improving ideation. In particular, increasing levels of engagement and immersion among participants and using aspects of game theory are seen a possible areas of further investigation