Search

Part 1: HCI Education and Training; International audience; Gamification, i.e. applying game elements in non-game contexts, is been increasingly used for designing systems and application elements to foster user engagement, enjoyment and support behavior change. Experts agree that, to be efficient, gamification strategies should be designed in a user-centric fashion. However, current user-centered design approaches in gamification primarily involve users during user research and iterative testing. In this paper, we describe an ideation approach for involving users in the conceptualization of gamification, making the gamification design process a more participatory activity, a process done with the user rather then for the user. Our results show that our method fostered participation without confining creativity. Participants were able to generate many ideas, several of them being “out of the box”.

Part 2: Usability Evaluation and Testing; International audience; In a user-centered development process, prototypes evolve in iterative cycles until they meet users’ requirements and then become the final product. Every cycle gives the opportunity to revise the design and to introduce new requirements which might affect the specification of artifacts that have been set in former development phases. Testing the consistency of multiple artifacts used to develop interactive systems every time that a new requirement is introduced is a cumbersome activity, especially if it is done manually. This paper proposes an approach based on Behavior-Driven Development (BDD) to support the automated assessment of artifacts along the development process of interactive systems. The paper uses an ontology for specifying tests that can run over multiple artifacts sharing similar concepts. A case study testing Prototypes and Final User Interfaces is presented to demonstrate the feasibility of this approach in early phases of the design process, providing a continuous quality assurance of requirements, and helping clients and development teams to identify potential problems and inconsistencies before commitments with software implementation.

Part 2: Late Breaking Results; International audience; Recommendation is a popular feature of social software. Recommendations could be made by the software autonomously or by social contacts who are often aided by the software on what to recommend. A great deal of emphasis in the literature has been given to the algorithmic solution to infer relevant and interesting recommendations. Yet, the delivery method of recommendation is still a widely unexplored research topic. This paper advocates that the success in deducing recommendations is not the sole factor for “recommendees” to consider. Users have their own requirements on the way a recommendation is made and delivered. Failure in meeting user expectations would often lead to the rejection of the recommendations as well as the violation of user experience. In this paper, we conduct an empirical research to explore such user’s perspective. We start with qualitative phase, based on interviews, and confirm and enhance the results in a quantitative phase through surveying a large sample of users. We report on the results and conclude with a set of guidelines on how recommendations delivery should be designed from a user’s perspective.

Part 1: Research Papers; International audience; It has been argued that too much research on usability engineering is incoherent with the processes, and settings being the realities for practitioners. In this paper we want to extend the existing knowledge about usability engineering in the wild. Through 12 semi-structured interviews we wanted to get an understanding of how usability is perceived, and practiced in reality. We found that our participants primarily focus on upfront work to support the design, and implementation process. They implement usability engineering through informal evaluations, and by following a set of local de facto standards. We want to extend the existing body of knowledge about usability engineering in practice, to support the development of methods aimed at practitioners.