User Centered Design

Pervasive and ubiquitous computing has the potential to make huge changes in the ways that we will learn throughout our lives. This paper presents a vision for the lifelong user model as a first class citizen, existing independently of any single application and controlled by the learner. The paper argues that this has a key role for a vision of personalized lifelong learning and for augmented cognition that enables learners to supplement their own knowledge with readily accessible digital information based on documents that they have accessed or used. The paper presents work that provides foundations for this vision. First, it outlines technical issues and research into approaches for addressing them. Then, it presents work on the interface between the learner and the lifelong user model, an aspect that is important because the human issues of control and privacy are so central. The final discussion and conclusions outline a roadmap for future research that will underpin this vision of the lifelong user model.

The goal of this user centered design (UCD) study was to to identify usability issues on the Boğaziçi University Industrial Engineering (BUIE) department website user interface (UI) and also to provide a re-design guideline for the website. In this context, the website was evalauted via using heuristic evaluation, remote usability testing, and post-test questionnaire methods. Every single screen of the BUIE website was evaluated, and design problems along with associated severity rankings were determined. Based on the heuristic evaluation findings, various task scenarios were created for the remote usability testing study. Four diffferent user groups were identified for the study: high school students, BUIE undergraduate students, BUIE Graduate students/academic staff, and other university students. The users were asked to perform tasks relavant to the group characteristics and expectations related to the website. Their performance were evaluated in terms of task completion success rate, number of clicks, and time spent till either accomplishment, failure, or quittance by a remote usability testing tool, Loop11. A post user testing questionnaire was also administered online where the user subjective rating data were collected for each task in terms of ease of use. The results indicated numerous UI design issues, as confirmed by both heuristic and usability testing methods. Further redesign study is required to implement the results of this sudy in order to enhance the ease of use of the BUIE department website.

Every now and then existing methods in the User-Centered Design (UCD) process evolve and new methods are being introduced. In this position paper we discuss our new approach for studying communities within the new media landscape. First, this new approach contains ways to improve the relations between the designers, researchers and developers on the one hand and the users on the other hand. Second, we suggest encouraging more contact between the users themselves during the research phase. Ultimately these two factors contribute to a better user involvement and participation in the study which provides better results and richer information from that study.

Technology for building smart homes is here today; however, a solid understanding of how people will interact in these spaces is not. In this paper, we present our research into designing a smart living space that focuses on inherent social behavior and in turn facilitates social interactions. We start by explaining our initial design scenario, and then discuss the process whereby we obtained data about user needs in a smart living space. We then offer six principles for building an environment that assists in home activities and explain how these principles could be applied to similar projects. We walk through selected parts of our design and then offer recommendations and future directions for smart living space research.

Appropriate design of the interaction between humans and robots will be a crucial factor for the acceptance of domestic robots. A promising approach is to equip robots with life-like and social characteristics. A coherent personality expressed through behavior can help users to understand and predict the actions of a robot. We describe existing approaches for designing robot personality and argue that an integrated design process is needed.

Storyboarding is a common technique in HCI and design for demonstrating system interfaces and contexts of use. Despite its recognized benefits, novice designers still encounter challenges in the creation of storyboards. Furthermore, as computing becomes increasingly integrated into the environment, blurring the distinction between the system and its surrounding context, it is imperative to depict context explicitly in storyboards. In this paper, we present two formative studies designed to uncover the important elements of storyboards. These elements include the use of text, inclusion of people, level of detail, number of panels, and representation of the passage of time. We further present an empirical study to assess the effects of these elements on the understanding and enjoyment of storyboard consumers. Finally, we demonstrate how these guidelines were successfully used in an undergraduate HCI class.

There is a growing need for designers with research skills and designers that are able to design for the user experience, next to or instead of technical issues. Over the past five years we have developed so-called ‘contextmapping’ techniques to inform and inspire design teams about the experiences of the prospective users of the products the team designs. In this paper we present the key elements of this teaching programme, and explain how we divided the elements over different courses in the Industrial Design Engineering curriculum in our university.

Synthesis Lectures on Data Management is edited by Tamer Özsu of the University of Waterloo. The series will publish 50-to 125 page publications on topics pertaining to data management. The scope will largely follow the purview of premier information and computer science conferences, such as ACM SIGMOD, VLDB, ICDE, PODS, ICDT, and ACM KDD. Potential topics include, but not are limited to: query languages, database system architectures, transaction management, data warehousing, XML and databases, data stream systems, wide scale data distribution, multimedia data management, data mining, and related subjects.

The elderly face serious social, environmental, and physical constraints that impact their well-being. Some of the most serious of these are shrinking social connections, limitations in building new relationships, and diminished health. To address these issues, we have designed an augmented dancing environment that allows elders to select dance sequences from well-known movies and dance along with them. The goal of DanceAlong is twofold: (1) to provide entertainment and exercise for each individual user and (2) to promote social engagement within the group. We deployed DanceAlong in a cultural celebration at a senior community center and conducted evaluations. In this paper, we present the design process of DanceAlong, evaluations of DanceAlong, and design guidelines for creating similar interactive systems for the elderly.

This paper presents the concept of ambient narratives to represent dynamic open ambient intelligence environments and an end-user software engineering approach that supports retail designers to create, simulate, deploy and maintain interactive immersive retail spaces in this model. We present the user-centered design approach that led to this implementation and the user evaluation of the end-user authoring environment for an intelligent shop window installation with a group of retail designers, consultants and retailers.

We report work on a LEGO robot that displays different emotional expressions in response to physical stimulation, for the purpose of social interaction with humans. This is a first step toward our longer-term goal of exploring believable emotional exchanges to achieve plausible interaction with a simple robot. Drawing inspiration from theories of human basic emotions, we have implemented several prototypical expressions in the robot's caricaturized face and conducted experiments to assess the recognizability of these expressions.

This article presents a constrained review of human factors issues relevant to adaptive automation (AA), including designing complex system interfaces to support AA, facilitating human-computer interaction and crew interactions in adaptive system operations, and considering workload associated with AA management in the design of human roles in adaptive systems. Unfortunately, these issues have received limited attention in earlier reviews of AA. This work is aimed at supporting a general theory of human-centered automation advocating humans as active information processors in complex system control loops to support situation awareness and effective performance. The review demonstrates the need for research into user-centered design of dynamic displays in adaptive systems. It also points to the need for discretion in designing transparent interfaces to facilitate human awareness of modes of automated systems. Finally, the review identifies the need to consider critical human-human interactions in designing adaptive systems. This work describes important branches of a developing framework of AA research and contributes to the general theory of human-centered automation.

We present the development and initial evaluation of a personalized reminiscence program, which was developed specifically for use by patients and their caregivers in the treatment of mild to moderate Alzheimer's disease (AD). The system is part of a collaborative effort assessing the effects on patients with Alzheimer's disease of two non-pharmacological computer-based interventions, namely: personalized reminiscence therapy and cognitive training.

Developments in mixed reality systems in the last decade have provided proof-of-concepts by means of technologytailored usage scenarios. Instead of focusing on the technology required for implementation, we have shifted our focus towards users, investigating the potential impact of such techniques on the actual work practice of industrial designers. Specific activities have been identified during a full ethnographic study conducted by means of Cultural Probes and Workshops with representative participants. We have identified an important task, the creation of mood boards, and have explored how industrial designers perceive the use of mixed reality to support their work by asking them to create a mood board on an existing mixed reality prototype. Participants were enthusiastic about the idea of creating mood boards in mixed reality.

Improvements in bandwidth and computing led towards a growth of technological solutions in services. Also, users developed expectations and skills in their interaction with technology. Despite web and mobile technology makes available a great deal of advanced and engaging apps (e.g., social and geo-localized), less-sophisticated and appealing systems (e.g., automatic teller machines, ticket machines) still represent the most widespread contact points between organizations (e.g., banks, transportation companies) and their clients. In this scenario banks are challenging a service innovation by introducing new services in their ATM. However, this increase in services does not seem to match an appropriate level of usability and user experience. The present work investigates the relation between usability and user experience in kiosk through a usability evaluation and a further redesign process for an ATM of an Italian major bank. The redesign process, centered on the users needs, was aimed to solve usability issues and enhance the effectiveness of the system and the overall user experience 1) by operating major changes in the original structure and 2) by introducing new profile-based functions. In order to test the effectiveness of design hypothesis, a prototype was developed and tested with a sample of users.. Result showed an enhancement of user satisfaction and a reduction of the error rate mainly due to the introduction of profile-based functions.

In a fully autonomous car - steering, deceleration and acceleration are completely controlled by the intelligence built into it. This leads to a major change in user experience as the driver needs different information and is less involved in the driving itself. We are working on redesigning the user experience of the autonomous car from a holistic user experience perspective of the driver. Our design was driven by a more anthropomorphic view of the car. The driving metaphor being that an autonomous car and the driver are travelling companions. Our work currently is geared towards emulating the key characteristics of this friendship and formulating a design scheme to design each device (and modality within). In this paper we introduce this idea and exemplify some design decisions by referring to a new dashboard for the autonomous car simulator at Stanford. This paper will underline our position that we strongly believe user experience design for autonomous cars needs a tremendous shift towards a more elaborated understanding of user interactions as well as new approaches in order to address the challenges given by the changed experience of the autonomous driving.

The open systems concept in the design of computer-based systems has become accepted as a method for developing cost-effective systems. One goal of open systems design within the U. S. Department of Defense is user portability. User portability can be described as the ability of users to move from one application or system to another, with minimal difficulties. It is accomplished by applying style guide principles and user interface specifications concurrently with user-centered design. The key factor for integrating these into the design process is the use of human factors engineering. * Pacific Northwest National Laboratory is operated for the U.S. Department of Energy by Battelle under Contract DE-ACO6-76RLO 1830.

C. Stephanidis (Ed.): Universal Access in HCI, Part III, HCII 2009, LNCS 5616, pp. 745–754, 2009. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2009 ... Integrating HCI in a Web Accessibility Engineering ... Lourdes Moreno, Paloma Martínez, and Belén Ruiz-Mezcua

As information technology continues to spread, we believe that there will be an increasing awareness of a fundamental need to address privacy concerns, and that doing so will require an understanding of policies that govern information use accompanied by development of technologies that can implement such policies. The research reported here describes our efforts to design a system which facilitates privacy policy authoring, implementation, and compliance monitoring. We employed a variety of user-centered design methods with 109 target users across the four steps of the research reported here. This case study highlights the work of identifying organizational privacy requirements, iteratively designing and validating a prototype with target users, and conducting laboratory tests to guide specific design decisions to meet the needs of providing flexible privacy enabling technologies. Each of the four steps in our work is identified and described, and directions for future work in privacy are suggested. r

In the majority of existing applications, users are enabled to interact with embodied conversational agents (ECAs) with keyboard and mouse. However, while using a keyboard to communicate with an agent that talks and simulates human-like expressions is quite unnatural, a speech-based user input is a more natural way to interact with a human-like interlocutor. In addition, spoken interaction is likely to become more common in the near future. Humans proved to align themselves in conversations by matching their nonverbal behavior and word use: they instinctively converge in the number of words used by turn and in the selection of terms belonging to 'social/affect' or 'cognitive' categories (Niederhoffer and Pennebaker, 2002). ECAs should be able to emulate this ability; understanding whether and how the interaction mode influences the user behavior and defining a method to recognize relevant aspects of this behavior is therefore important in establishing how the ECA should adapt to the situation.

A central challenge in weight management is the difficulty of overcoming desires for excessive and unhealthy food. Yet, studies show that when people are able to resist their desires for unhealthy choices, they experience pride and satisfaction. In order to alleviate the former and support the latter, we designed, implemented and tested a mobile application for improving snacking behavior. Our application delivers a food craving reduction intervention at the moment of need and allows users to track how often they successfully resisted cravings. Our craving reduction intervention is based on recent research that shows that food cravings can be reduced through imagery techniques. We conducted a week-long evaluation of our application, comparing the effectiveness of our application to a basic tracking application. We found that our imagery application significantly reduced both overall snacking and unhealthy snacking compared to a simple snack-tracking application.

It is often said that universal design and similar approaches can be a source of innovation. In this paper key elements in inclusive design are identified, and examples of innovations related to inclusive design are presented. Then, some core elements of the inclusive design process that will help spur innovation are identified. Based on this the link between inclusive design and innovation is discussed. Finally, some recommendations for an inclusive and innovative design process are presented.

Infrastructure software comprises code libraries or runtime processes that support the development or operation of application software. A particular infrastructure system may support certain styles of application, and may even determine the features of applications built using it. This poses a challenge: although we have good techniques for designing and evaluating interactive applications, our techniques for designing and evaluating infrastructure intended to support these applications are much less well formed. In this paper, we reflect on case studies of two infrastructure systems for interactive applications. We look at how traditional user-centered techniques, while appropriate for application design and evaluation, fail to properly support infrastructure design and evaluation. We present a set of lessons from our experience, and conclude with suggestions for better user-centered design and evaluation of infrastructure software.

Among the wide range of digital libraries, an interesting, yet quite neglected, subclass is constituted by those exclusively dealing with newspaper clippings. Compared with book–oriented digital libraries, clipping libraries are more difficult to seize, since they are wide and unstructured, and the subjects and content of a clipping are completely heterogeneous. LAURIN is an EU–funded project involving seventeen participants from several countries, including two software companies and a large group of libraries, whose main purpose is to set up a network of digitalized newspaper clipping archives that can be easily accessed through the Internet, for searching and retrieving clippings. The project also provides the libraries with models and methodologies to be used for scanning, digitalizing, storing, indexing, and making accessible newspaper clippings. This paper concentrates on the main architectural features of the LAURIN distributed system, exposing the peculiarities deriving from...

Cyber analytics focuses on increasing the safety and soundness of our digital infrastructure. The volume, size and velocity of these datasets make the analysis challenging on current work environments and tools. A cyber analytics work environment should enable multiple, simultaneous investigations and information foraging, as well as provide a solution space for organizing data. As such, various workflow visualization tools are used to help users track their analysis, reuse effective workflows, and test hypotheses. Also, the use of ...

projet de recherche collaboratif et interdisciplinaire en école supérieure d'art Roland Cahen ENSCI roland.cahen@wanadoo.fr www.ensci.com http://projetenigmes.free.fr RESUME Le projet ENIGMES 1 (Expérimentation de Nouvelles Interfaces Gestuelles pour la Musique et le Son) développé à l'ENSCI (Ecole Nationale Supérieure de Création Industrielle) en 2006-2007 est un projet de recherche et d'expérimentation pédagogique interdisciplinaire associant des étudiants, des enseignants, des chercheurs et des artistes. Le thème en est la partition navigable (ou partition instrument) soit une approche interdisciplinaire de la composition et du jeu musical électroacoustique tirant parti des possibilités offertes par les outils numériques. La recherche musicale porte sur des problématiques d'usage dans un cadre pédagogique. Quatre métaphores d'usage ont été définies et développées : deux concernant les interfaces gestuelles, et deux les modalités de navigation sonore en 2D et 3D (Chap. 3). Un outil logiciel que nous détaillerons a été développé pour ce projet : ENIGMES-Lib. Ce projet s'inscrit dans le contexte pédagogique du développement de la recherche dans les écoles d'art (Chap. 5). Nous avons ajouté cette dernière partie portant sur des questions sociopolitiques car la forme et le contenu de cette recherche nous paraissent indissociablement dépendants de son contexte d'existence.

With the continually increasing complexity of e-learning environments, there is a need for integrating concepts of cognitive load theory (CLT) with concepts of human-computer interaction (HCI). Basic concepts of both fields were reviewed and contrasted. A literature review was conducted within the literature database ''The Guide to Computing Literature," searching for ''cognitive load theory" and ''Sweller." Sixty-five publications contained ''cognitive load" in their titles or abstracts. Each publication was checked to see whether it contained the concepts of intrinsic, extraneous, or germane cognitive load. The review showed that CLT concepts have been adopted in HCI. However, the concept of germane cognitive load has attracted less attention up to the present time. Two conceptual models are proposed. The first model divides extraneous cognitive load into load induced by the instructional design and load caused by software usage. The model clarifies the focus of traditional usability principles and of existing instructional design principles derived from CLT. The second model fits CLT concepts into the basic components of user-centered design. The concept of germane cognitive load illustrates that an increase of cognitive load can be desirable when designing e-learning environments. Areas for future interdisciplinary research are sketched.

In this paper we describe how we have integrated several techniques of the "Design thinking" (DT) into the User Center Design (UCD) methodology in the process of development of project as a learning activity. The experimental activity has been carried out with students of the Human Computer Interaction's subject, corresponding to the 3º course of the School of Computer Science of the University of La Laguna.

Despite the advances of the electronic technologies in e-learning, a consolidated evaluation methodology for e-learning applications does not yet exist. The goal of e-learning is to offer the users the possibility to become skillful and acquire knowledge on a new domain. The evaluation of educational software must consider its pedagogic effectiveness as well as its usability. The design of its interface should take into account the way students learn and also provide good usability so that student's interactions with the software are as natural and intuitive as possible. In this paper, we present the results obtained from a first phase of observation and analysis of the interactions of people with e-learning applications. The aim is to provide a methodology for evaluating such applications.

The human being does not separate emotion from cognition, even when using or buying a product. This is one of the reasons why product and interface designers started to consider the emotions and pleasures that a product can bring to the user as part of their creating process. So, words as feelings, emotions, experience, pleasure and beauty have become more