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We present Rataplan, a robust and resilient pixel-based approach for linking multi-modal proxies to automated sequences of actions in graphical user interfaces (GUIs). With Rataplan, users demonstrate a sequence of actions and answer human-readable follow-up questions to clarify their desire for automation. After demonstrating a sequence, the user can link a proxy input control to the action which can then be used as a shortcut for automating a sequence. Alternatively, output proxies use a notification model in which content is pushed when it becomes available. As an example use case, Rataplan uses keyboard shortcuts and tangible user interfaces (TUIs) as input proxies, and TUIs as output proxies. Instead of relying on available APIs, Rataplan automates GUIs using pixel-based reverse engineering. This ensures our approach can be used with all applications that offer a GUI, including web applications. We implemented a set of important strategies to support robust automation of modern interfaces that have a flat and minimal style, have frequent data and state changes, and have dynamic viewports.

Virtual Reality (VR) allows simulation of machine control panels without physical access to the machine, enabling easier and faster initial exploration, testing, and validation of machine panel designs. However, haptic feedback is indispensable if we want to interact with these simulated panels in a realistic manner. We present HapticPanel, an encountered-type haptic system that provides realistic haptic feedback for machine control panels in VR. To ensure a realistic manipulation of input elements, the user’s hand is continuously tracked during interaction with the virtual interface. Based on which virtual element the user intends to manipulate, a motorized panel with stepper motors moves a corresponding physical input element in front of the user’s hand, enabling realistic physical interaction.

Physical exercise training and medication compliance are primary components of cardiac rehabilitation. When rehabilitating independently at home, patients often fail to comply with their prescribed medication and find it challenging to interpret exercise targets or be aware of the expected efforts. Our work aims to assist cardiac patients in understanding their condition better, promoting medication adherence and motivating them to achieve their exercise targets in a tele-rehabilitation setting. We introduce a patient-centric intelligible visualization approach to present prescribed medication and exercise targets to patients. We assessed efficacy of intelligible visualizations on patients’ comprehension in two lab studies. We evaluated the impact on patient motivation and health outcomes in field studies. Patients were able to adhere to medication prescriptions, manage their physical exercises, monitor their progress and gained better self-awareness on how they achieved their rehabilitation targets. Patients confirmed that the intelligible visualizations motivated them to achieve their targets better. We observed an improvement in overall physical activity levels and health outcomes of patients. Research Highlights Presents challenges currently faced in cardiac tele-rehabilitation. Demonstrates how intelligibility was applied to two core aspects of cardiac rehabilitation- promoting medication adherence and physical exercise training. Lab., field and clinical studies to demonstrate efficacy of intelligible visualization, impact on patient motivation and resultant health outcomes. Reflection on how similar HCI approaches could be leveraged for technology-supported management of critical health conditions such as cardiac diseases.

Feedback and feedforward are two fundamental mechanisms that support users’ activities while interacting with computing devices. While feedback can be easily solved by providing information to the users following the triggering of an action, feedforward is much more complex as it must provide information before an action is performed. For interactive applications where making a mistake has more impact than just reduced user comfort, correct feedforward is an essential step toward correctly informed, and thus safe, usage. Our approach, Fortunettes, is a generic mechanism providing a systematic way of designing feedforward addressing both action and presentation problems. Including a feedforward mechanism significantly increases the complexity of the interactive application hardening developers’ tasks to detect and correct defects. We build upon an existing formal notation based on Petri Nets for describing the behavior of interactive applications and present an approach that allows for adding correct and consistent feedforward.

The number of wearable devices that we carry increases, with smaller companion devices like smartwatches providing quick access for simple tasks. These devices are, however, not necessarily in direct sight of the user and during everyday activities, it is unlikely, even undesirable, that the user constantly focuses on or interacts with these screens. Furthermore, interaction is often limited because our hands are occupied carrying or holding items such as bags, papers, boxes, or tools. In this paper, we evaluate how encumbrance affects, among others, the time it takes to perceive and react to a notification depending on the placement of the companion device. Our experimental results can assist designers in choosing the right device for the task.

Listening to music while being on the move is common in our headphone society. However, if we want assistance in navigation from our smartphone, existing approaches either demand exclusive playback through the headphones or impact the listening experience of the music. We present a field evaluation of Attracktion, a spatial audio navigation system that leverages the access to single stems in a multi-track recording to minimize the impact on the listening experience. We compared Attracktion against current turn-by-turn navigation instructions in a field-study with 22 users and found that users perceived acoustic overlays with additional navigation information to have no impact on the listening experience. In terms of path efficiency, errors, and mental workload, Attracktion is on par with spoken turn-by-turn navigation instructions, and users liked it for the aspect of serendipity.

This study focuses on innovative ways to digitally instrument the servicescape in bricks-and-mortar retailing. In the present digital era, technological developments allow for augmenting the shopping experience and capturing moments-of-truth along the shopper's path-to-purchase. This article provides an encompassing inventory of retail technologies resulting from a systematic screening of three secondary data sources, over 2008–2016: (1) the academic marketing literature, (2) retailing related scientific ICT publications, and (3) business practices (e.g., publications from retail labs and R&D departments). An affinity diagram approach allows for clustering the retail technologies from an HCI perspective. Additionally, a categorization of the technologies takes place in terms of the type of shopping value that they offer, and the stage in the path-to-purchase they prevail. This indepth analysis results in a comprehensive inventory of retail technologies that allows for verifying the suitability of these technologies for targeted in-store shopper marketing objectives (cf. the resulting online faceted-search repository at www.retail-tech.org). The findings indicate that the majority of the inventoried technologies provide cost savings, convenience and utilitarian value, whereas few offer hedonic or symbolic benefits. Moreover, at present the earlier stages of the path-to-purchase appear to be the most instrumented. The article concludes with a research agenda. This research has been funded by the Digitopia and Flanders Innovation & Entrepreneurship Baekeland grant number 150726 (‘In search of a sustainable competitive advantage: Digitally instrumenting bricks-and-mortar retailing in Flanders’; April 2016–March 2020). The authors furthermore acknowledge Randy Lauriers for her input in the data collection process for this study and the two anonymous reviewers whose suggestions helped in further strengthening a previous version of this manuscript.

Fig. 1. Based on self-sustaining predictions (e.g. the sun will set), FORTNIoT can deduce when trigger-condition-action rules (e.g. IF sun set AND anyone home THEN lower the rolling shutter) will trigger in the near future and what effects they will cause (e.g. the rolling shutter will lower). Ubiquitous environments, such as smart homes, are becoming more intelligent and autonomous. As a result, their behavior becomes harder to grasp and unintended behavior becomes more likely. Researchers have contributed tools to better understand and validate an environments' past behavior (e.g. logs, end-user debugging), and to prevent unintended behavior. There is, however, a lack of tools that help users understand the future behavior of such an environment. Information about the actions it will perform, and why it will perform them, remains concealed. In this paper, we contribute FORTNIoT, a well-defined approach that combines self-sustaining predictions (e.g. weather forecasts) and simulations of trigger-condition-action rules to deduce when these rules will trigger in the future and what state changes they will cause to connected smart home entities. We implemented a proof-of-concept of this approach, as well as a visual demonstrator that shows such predictions, including causes and effects, in an overview of a smart home's behavior. A between-subject evaluation with 42 participants indicates that FORTNIoT predictions lead to a more accurate understanding of the future behavior, more confidence in that understanding, and more appropriate trust in what the system will (not) do. We envision a wide variety of situations where predictions about the future are beneficial to inhabitants of smart homes, such as debugging unintended behavior and managing conflicts by exception, and hope to spark a new generation of intelligible tools for ubiquitous environments.

Translation environments offer various translation aids to support professional translators. However, translation aids typically provide only limited justification for the translation suggestions they propose. In this paper we present Intellingo, a translation environment that explores intelligibility for translation aids, to enable more sensible usage of translation suggestions. We performed a comparative study between an intelligible version and a non-intelligible version of Intellingo. The results show that although adding intelligibility does not necessarily result in significant changes to the user experience, translators can better assess translation suggestions without a negative impact on their performance. Intelligibility is preferred by translators when the additional information it conveys benefits the translation process and when this information is not part of the translator’s readily available knowledge. The SCATE (Smart Computer-Aided Translation Environment) project IWT 130041 is funded by the Flemish Institute for the Promotion of the Scientific-Technological Research in the Industry (IWT Vlaanderen).

The emergence of smart objects has the potential to radically change the way we interact with technology. Through embedded means for input and output, such objects allow for more natural and immediate interaction. The SmartObjects workshop will focus on how such embedded intelligence in objects situated in the user's physical environment can be used to provide more efficient and enjoyable interactions. We discuss the design from the technology and the user experience perspective.

We present a scalable Do-It-Yourself (DIY) fabrication workflow for prototyping highly stretchable yet robust devices using a CO2 laser cutter, which we call Silicone Devices. Silicone Devices are self-contained and thus embed components for input, output, processing, and power. Our approach scales to arbitrary complex devices as it supports techniques to make multi-layered stretchable circuits and buried VIAs. Additionally, high-frequency signals are supported as our circuits consist of liquid metal and are therefore highly conductive and durable. To enable makers and interaction designers to prototype a wide variety of Silicone Devices, we also contribute a stretchable sensor toolkit, consisting of touch, proximity, sliding, pressure, and strain sensors. We demonstrate the versatility and novel opportunities of our technique by prototyping various samples and exploring their use cases. Strain tests report on the reliability of our circuits and preliminary user feedback reports on the user-experience of our workflow by non-engineers.

Implementing multimodal interactions with event-driven languages results in a ‘callback soup', a source code littered with a multitude of flags that have to be maintained in a self-consistent manner and across different event handlers. Prototyping multimodal interactions adds to the complexity and error sensitivity, since the program code has to be refined iteratively as developers explore different possibilities and solutions. The authors present a declarative language for rapid prototyping multimodal interactions: Hasselt permits declaring composite events, sets of events that are logically related because of the interaction they support, that can be easily bound to dedicated event handlers for separate interactions. The authors' approach allows the description of multimodal interactions at a higher level of abstraction than event languages, which saves developers from dealing with the typical ‘callback soup' thereby resulting in a gain in programming efficiency and a reduction in errors when writing event handling code. They compared Hasselt with using a traditional programming language with strong support for events in a study with 12 participants each having a solid background in software development. When performing equivalent modifications to a multimodal interaction, the use of Hasselt leads to higher completion rates, lower completion times, and less code testing than when using a mainstream event-driven language.

Keeping track of design processes is a cumbersome task due to the apparently unconstrained and unstructured nature of creative work. Traceability is fundamental to revisit and reflect on the design narratives that describe artefact evolution. In this paper, we aim to identify what characteristics are necessary to facilitate traceability of creative design processes. For this end, we use a functional prototype to connect artefacts, design rationale, and decisions in a shared workspace. We evaluated this prototype for 15 weeks with six pairs of students engaged in a user-centered design project. Our findings show that having a lean repository of artefacts annotated with design rationale can facilitate tracking progress in different phases of the process. We found that creating a record of the participants' design work is useful to reflect on and for team agreement, ensure consistency of evolving artefacts, and help in planning future steps in the design project.

Physical exercise is a primary component of cardiac rehabilitation. Interpreting exercise targets and being aware of the expected effort while rehabilitating independently at home is challenging for patients. Our work aims to assist cardiac patients in understanding their condition better and motivating them to achieve their exercise targets in a tele-rehabilitation setting. We introduce a patient-centric intelligible visualization approach to present prescribed rehabilitation targets to patients based on Metabolic Equivalent of Tasks (METs). We assessed efficacy of intelligible visualizations on patients’ comprehension in a lab study. We evaluated the impact on patient motivation and health outcomes in field studies. Patients were able to manage their prescribed activities, monitor their progress, and gained understanding on how their physical activities contribute to their rehabilitation targets. Patients confirmed that the intelligible visualizations motivated them to achieve their targets better. We observed an improvement in overall physical activity levels and health outcomes of patients.

We present StrutModeling, a computationally enhanced construction kit that enables users without a 3D modeling background to prototype 3D models by assembling struts and hub primitives in physical space. Physical 3D models are immediately captured in software and result in readily available models for 3D printing. Given the concrete physical format of StrutModels, modeled objects can be tested and fine tuned in the presence of existing objects and specific needs of users. StrutModeling avoids puzzling with pieces by contributing an adjustable strut and universal hub design. Struts can be adjusted in length and snap to magnetic hubs in any configuration. As such, arbitrarily complex models can be modeled, tested, and adjusted during the design phase. In addition, the embedded sensing capabilities allow struts to be used as measuring devices for lengths and angles, and tune physical mesh models according to existing physical objects.

Part 7: Design Rationale and Camera-Control; International audience; In the design process, designers make a wide variety of decisions that are essential to transform a design from a conceptual idea into a concrete solution. Recording and tracking design decisions, a first step to capturing the rationale of the design process, are tasks that until now are considered as cumbersome and too constraining. We used a holistic approach to design, deploy, and verify decision cards; a low threshold tool to capture, externalize, and contextualize design decisions during early stages of the design process. We evaluated the usefulness and validity of decision cards with both novice and expert designers. Our exploration results in valuable insights into how such decision cards are used, into the type of information that practitioners document as design decisions, and highlight the properties that make a recorded decision useful for supporting awareness and traceability on the design process.

Design meetings with multidisciplinary stakeholders are instrumental for design projects. However, design teams face the challenges of synthetizing large amounts of information, often in a limited time, and with minimal common ground. We investigate these challenges through in-the-wild observations of six design meetings in three different projects, with professional design teams that follow a user-centered design methodology. We found that all the observed design meetings had a similar structure consisting of particular phases, in which design activities were organized around artefacts. These artefacts were used as input to disseminate and gather feedback of previous design outcomes, or as output to collect and process a variety of perspectives. From these findings, we synthetize practical guidelines to optimize artefact-based interactions during design meetings.

Part 7: Demonstrations; International audience; Patient coaching is integral to cardiac rehabilitation programs to help patients understand, cope better with their condition and become active participants in their care. The introduction of remote patient monitoring technologies and tele-monitoring solutions have proven to be effective and paved way for novel remote rehabilitation approaches. Nonetheless, these solutions focus largely on monitoring patients without a specific focus on coaching patients. Additionally, these systems lack personalization and a deeper understanding of individual patient needs. In our demonstration, we present a tool to personalize e-coaching based on individual patient risk factors, adherence rates and personal preferences of patients using a tele-rehabilitation solution. We developed the tool after conducting a workshop and multiple brainstorms with various caregivers involved in coaching cardiac patients to connect their perspectives with patient needs. It was integrated into a comprehensive tele-rehabilitation application.

Human-Robot Collaboration is increasingly considered in manufacturing to better combine the strengths of humans and robots. Establishing this human-robot collaboration may require multi-modal interaction; input to and output from the robot can both use multiple channels in sequence or in parallel. Designing effective interaction requires the expertise from different domains, possibly originating from people with different backgrounds. In our work we explore how composite events — hierarchical composition of events — can be used in a way that eases the communication within a multi-disciplinary team. In this paper, we present how the concept of composite events can be used to create different layers of abstraction that can be used to ease prototyping and discussion of human-robot collaboration with stakeholders through a supporting tool called Hasselt UIMS. At the lower level(s) of abstraction, the composite events can be mapped to the message-based communication as implemented in the Robotic Operating System (ROS), which is used to program collaborative robots, such as the Baxter robot from Rethink Robotics.

In this paper, we set out to find what encompasses an appropriate visual language for information presented on near-eye out-of-focus displays. These displays are positioned in a user's peripheral view, very near to the user's eyes, for example on the inside of the temples of a pair of glasses. We explored the usable display area, the role of spatial and retinal variables, and the influence of motion and interaction for such a language. Our findings show that a usable visual language can be accomplished by limiting the possible shapes and by making clever use of orientation and meaningful motion. We found that especially motion is very important to improve perception and comprehension of what is being displayed on near-eye out-of-focus displays, and that perception is further improved if direct interaction with the content is allowed.

Professional video searchers typically have to search for particular video fragments in a vast video archive that contains many hours of video data. Without having the right video archive exploration tools, this is a difficult and time consuming task that induces hours of video skimming. We propose the video archive explorer, a video exploration tool that provides visual representations of automatically detected concepts to facilitate individual and collaborative video search tasks. This video archive explorer is developed by employing a user-centred methodology, which ensures that the tool is more likely to fit to the end user needs. A qualitative evaluation with professional video searchers shows that the combination of automatic video indexing, interactive visualisations and user-centred design can result in an increased usability, user satisfaction and productivity. Haesen M., Meskens J., Luyten K., Coninx K., Becker J.H., Tuytelaars T., Poulisse G.-J., Pham The P., Moens M.-F., ''Finding a needle in a haystack: an interactive video archive explorer for professional video searchers'', Multimedia tools and applications, vol. 63, no. 2, pp. 331-356, 2013. ispartof: Multimedia Tools and Applications vol:63 issue:2 pages:331-356 status: published

In mobile tele-rehabilitation applications for Coronary Artery Disease (CAD) patients, behavior change plays a central role in influencing better therapy adherence and prevention of disease recurrence. However, creating sustainable behavior change that holds a beneficial impact over a prolonged period of time remains an important challenge. In this paper we discuss various models and frameworks related to persuasion and behavior change, and investigate how to incorporate these with a multidisciplinary user-centered design approach for creating a mobile tele-rehabilitation application. By implementing different concepts that contribute to behavior change and applying a set of distinct persuasive design patterns, we were able to translate the high-level goals of behavior theory into a mobile application that explicitly incorporates behavior change techniques and also offers a good overall user experience. We evaluated our system, HeartHab, in a lab setting and show that our approach leads to a high user acceptance and willingness to use the system in daily activities.

Design, and in particular user-centered design processes for interactive systems, typically involve multidisciplinary teams. The different and complementary perspectives of the team members enrich the design ideas and decisions, and the involvement of all team members is needed to achieve a user interface for a system that carefully considers all aspects, ranging from user needs to technical requirements. The difficulty is getting all team members involved in the early stages of design and communicating design ideas and decisions in a way that all team members can understand them and use them in an appropriate way in later stages of the process. This chapter describes the COMuICSer storyboarding technique, which presents the scenario of use of a future system in a way that is understandable for each team member, regardless of their background. Based on an observational study in which multidisciplinary teams collaboratively created storyboards during a co-located session, we present recommendations for the facilitation of co-located collaborative storyboarding sessions for multidisciplinary teams and digital tool support for this type of group work.

International audience; We present Gestu-Wan, an intelligible gesture guidance system designed to support mid-air gesture-based interaction for walk-up-and-use displays. Although gesture-based interfaces have become more prevalent, there is currently very little uniformity with regard to gesture sets and the way gestures can be executed. This leads to confusion, bad user experiences and users who rather avoid than engage in interaction using mid-air gesturing. Our approach improves the visibility of gesture-based interfaces and facilitates execution of mid-air gestures without prior training. We compare Gestu-Wan with a static gesture guide, which shows that it can help users with both performing complex gestures as well as understanding how the gesture recognizer works.

There is a growing demand for design support to create interactive systems that are deployed in ambient intelligent environments. Unlike traditional interactive systems, the wide diversity of situations these type of user interfaces need to work in require tool support that is close to the environment of the end-user on the one hand and provide a smooth integration with the application logic on the other hand. This paper shows how the model-based user interface development methodology can be applied for ambient intelligent environments; we propose a task-centered approach towards the design of interactive systems by means of appropriate visualizations and simulations of different models. Besides the use of these typical user interface models such as the task- and presentation-model to support interface design, we focus on user interfaces supporting situated task distributions and a visualization of context influences on deployed, possibly distributed, user interfaces. To enable this we introduce an environment model describing the device configuration at particular moment in time. To support the user interface designer while creating these complex interfaces for ambient intelligent environments, we discuss tool support using a visualization of the environment together with simulations of the user interface configurations. We also show how the concepts presented in the paper can be integrated within model-driven engineering, hereby narrowing the gap between HCI design and software engineering.

The usage of computing systems has evolved dramatically over the last years. Starting from a low level procedural usage, in which a process for executing one or several tasks is carried out, computers now tend to be used in a problem oriented way. Future computer usage will be more centered around particular services, and will not be focused on platforms or applications. These services should be independent of the technology used to interact with them. In this paper an approach will be presented which provides a uniform interface to such services, without any dependence on modality, platform or programming language. Through the usage of general user interface descriptions, presented in XML, and converted using XSLT, a uniform framework is presented for runtime migration of user interfaces. As a consequence, future services will become easily extensible for all kinds of devices and modalities. Special attention goes out to a component-based software development approach. Services represented by and grouped in components can offer a special interface for modal- and device-independent rendering. Components become responsible for describing their own possibilities and constraints for interacting. An implementation serving as a proof of concept, a runtime conversion of a joystick in a 3D virtual environment into a 2D dialog-based user interface, is developed.

Nonverbal and unconscious behaviour is an important component of daily human-human interaction. This is especially true in situations such as public speaking, job interviews or information sensitive conversations, where researchers have shown that an increased awareness of one's behaviour can improve the outcome of the interaction. With wearable technology, such as Google Glass, we now have the opportunity to augment social interactions and provide realtime feedback on one's behaviour in an unobtrusive way. In this paper we present Logue, a system that provides realtime feedback on the presenters' openness, body energy and speech rate during public speaking. The system analyses the user's nonverbal behaviour using social signal processing techniques and gives visual feedback on a head-mounted display. We conducted two user studies with a staged and a real presentation scenario which yielded that Logue's feedback was perceived helpful and had a positive impact on the speaker's performance.

We present ReHoblet; a physical rehabilitation game on tablets, designed to be used in a residential setting. ReHoblet trains two gross motor movements of the upper limbs by lifting (up-down) and transporting (left-right) the tablet to control a simple platform game. By using its accelerometers and gyroscope, the tablet is capable of detecting movements made by the user and steer the interaction based on this data. A formative evaluation with five Multiple Sclerosis (MS) patients and their therapists showed high appreciation for ReHoblet. Patients stated they liked ReHoblet not only to improve their physical abilities, but to train on performing technology-related tasks. Based on the results, we reflect on tablet-based games in home-based rehabilitation.

We present a new interaction space for wearables by integrating interactive elements, in the form of buttons, into outdoor clothing, specifically jackets and coats. Interactive buttons, or 'iButtons', allow users to perform specific tasks using subtle, inconspicuous gestures. They are intended for outdoor settings, where reaching for a mobile phone or an other device may not be convenient or appropriate. Different types of buttons serve dedicated functions, and appropriate placement of these buttons make them easily accessible, without requiring visual contact. By adding context sensitivity, these buttons can also be repurposed to fit other functions. By linking multiple buttons, it is possible to create workflows for specific tasks. We provide a description of an initial iButton design space and highlight some scenarios to illustrate the envisioned usage of interactive buttons.

Smartphones leak personal information about their owner when they use it to connect to the Internet. Despite recent coverage of these issues in popular media, raising awareness remains problematic since it remains largely invisible to the users. We designed a system, SASQUATCH, consisting of a network scanner and a public display, to draw the visitor's attention and inform them about these issues. SASQUATCH first gathers private information about previous whereabouts, and then shows an anonymized version of this data on the public display to draw the visitor's attention. Next, SASQUATCH offers an interactive component that allows people to view the information their own smartphone is leaking in private, and then provides solutions (including a fully-automated smartphone application) for securing against future privacy leaks. A set of initial field trails has shown that SASQUATCH is highly effective in raising awareness.

Feedback and affordances are two of the most well-known principles in interaction design. Unfortunately, the related and equally important notion of feedforward has not been given as much consideration. Nevertheless, feedforward is a powerful design principle for bridging Norman's Gulf of Execution. We reframe feedforward by disambiguating it from related design principles such as feedback and perceived affordances, and identify new classes of feedforward. In addition, we present a reference framework that provides a means for designers to explore and recognize different opportunities for feedforward. Copyright © 2013 ACM.

Modern knowledge work consists of both individual and highly collaborative activities that are typically composed of a number of configuration, coordination and articulation processes. The desktop interface today, however, provides very little support for these processes and rather forces knowledge workers to adapt to the technology. We introduce co-Activity Manager, an activity-centric desktop system that (i) provides tools for ad hoc dynamic configuration of a desktop working context, (ii) supports both explicit and implicit articulation of ongoing work through a built-in collaboration manager and (iii) provides the means to coordinate and share working context with other users and devices. In this paper, we discuss the activity theory informed design of co-Activity Manager and report on a 14 day field deployment in a multi-disciplinary software development team. The study showed that the activity-centric workspace supports different individual and collaborative work configuration practices and that activity-centric collaboration is a two-phase process consisting of an activity sharing and per-activity coordination phase.

People are more mobile than ever before. People predominantly need information or help that they can not anticipate and plan for before they begin their journey. There is an abundance of information around us. But the users seek precise and fine–grained information that is not provided by the computing environment but required to carry out their tasks. Especially nomadic users have little choice than to call upon help from other people present in their vicinity. There are social issues (e.g. availability and interruptibility) along with the issues of relevance and reliability to find the most appropriate person to ask for any information or help. Identifying this person is still a challenge today. In this chapter we provide a thorough and grounded discussion of the state of the art of help systems that glean answers from human.We also present the software prototype Ubiquitous–Help–System (UHS) that has been developed to demonstrate how using a social network in combination with the user profile and preferences, can assist a nomadic user. The system assists the nomadic user to find people who can support him in a large scale ubiquitous computing environment.

The broadcasting sector is facing challenging years. With the exponential growth of media content whilst consumers expect a high quality service, it is getting progressively more challenging to offer a personalized media experience. Media companies are continuously exploring novel ways to target their viewers with such a service. In this context, it is crucial for a broadcaster to get a better understanding of the targeted audience. In this paper we highlight how empathy is an essential ingredient for future personalized and interactive services and how it brings the consumer experience to an unprecedented level. Knowing how people experience different kinds of content is strategic information for a broadcaster. (Re)acting on this information potentially delivers better content targeting, enrichment and adaptation. We present an overview of the state-of-the art and how it is being applied in broadcasting. We illustrate this with a concrete example case of an empathic product and discuss the importance of empathic products for broadcasters. Additionally, we present the initial results of our own research projects.

Informing caregivers by providing them with contextual medical information can significantly improve the quality of patient care activities. However, information flow in hospitals is still tied to traditional manual or digitised lengthy patient record files that are often not accessible while caregivers are attending to patients. Leveraging the proliferation of pervasive awareness technologies (sensors, actuators and mobile displays), recent studies have explored this information presentation aspect borrowing theories from context-aware computing, i.e., presenting subtle information contextually to support the activity at hand. However, the understanding of the information space (i.e., what information should be presented) is still fairly abstruse, which inhibits the deployment of such real-time activity support systems. To this end, this paper first presents situated glyphs, a graphical entity to encode situation specific information, and then presents our findings from an in-situ qualitative study addressing the information space tailored to such glyphs. Applying technology probes using situated glyphs and different glyph display form factors, the study aimed at uncovering the information space pertained to both primary and secondary medical care. Our analysis has resulted in a large set of information types as well as given us deeper insight on the principles for designing future situated glyphs. We report our findings in this paper that we expect would provide a solid foundation for designing future assistive systems to support patient care activities.

With the emergence of ubiquitous computing, a dedicated network enabling applications for such systems becomes increasingly indispensable. Given the typical user-centered focus for ubiquitous applications, the dedicated network should be able to reconfigure itself autonomously according to the current context of use. In this paper, a new definition of a cognitive network is given and a clear line is drawn between cognitive networks and other types of networks. A framework for cognitive networks is presented and a novel cognition loop which is more consistent with human cognition is proposed. The evaluation of the design constitutes a partof the future work.

In contrast with design flaws that occur in user interfaces, design flaws in physical spaces have a much higher cost and impact. Software is in fact fairly easy to change and update in contrast with legacy physical constructions where updating their physical appearance is often not an option. We present the Feedforward Torch, a mobile projection system that targets the augmentation of legacy hardware with feedforward information. Feedforward explains users what the results of their action will be, and can thus be seen as the opposite of feedback. A first user study suggests that providing feedforward in these environments could improve their usability.

When people need help they often turn to their social peers for reliable information, recommendation or guidance. It is often difficult to find someone in the vicinity for help or communicate with someone from a distant place who can provide reliable help. Conveying the actual context of the question during remote communication is a cumbersome task, especially when avoiding speech communication. Our approach selects and prioritizes the contextual data for a question, based on the question content.We have developed a prototype for mobile users - the Ubiquitous Help System (UHS) - that implements a mixed-initiative approach for capturing, selecting and prioritizing contextual information as well as for selecting a group of users to send the question. UHS processes the user questions for clues on what context to include and presents its suggestions to the user. Contextual data that can be retrieved using the available sensors on the mobile device is automatically included for sending to the receiving parties alongside the question.

Localisation has become a standard feature in many mobile applications. Numerous techniques for both indoor and outdoor location tracking are available today, providing a diversity of ways positioning information can be delivered to a mobile application (e.g., a location-based service). Such factors as the variation of precision over time and covered areas or the difference in quality and reliability make the adoption of several techniques for one application cumbersome. This work presents an approach that models the capabilities of localisation systems and then uses this model to build a unified view on localisation, with special attention paid to uncertainty coming from different localisation conditions and its presentation to the user. We discuss technical considerations, challenges and issues of the approach and report about a user study on users' acceptance of the suggested behaviour of an application based on the approach. The results of the study showed the feasibility of the approach and revealed users' preference towards automatic but yet informed changes they experienced while using the application.

Despite the fact many proposals have been made for abstract user interface models it was not given a detailed context in which it should or could be used in a user-centered design process. This paper presents a clear role for the abstract user interface model in user-centered and model-based development, provides an overview of the stakeholders that may create and/or use abstract user interface models and presents a modular abstract user interface modeling language, CAP3, that makes relations with other models explicit and builds on the foundation of existing abstract user interface models. The proposed modeling notation is supported by a tool and applied to some case studies from literature and in some projects. It is also validated based on state-of-the-art knowledge on domain-specific modeling languages and visual notations and some case studies.

For the design and development of graphical user interfaces, designers have to take various guidelines, standards and target platform characteristics into account. This is often a hard and time consuming activity because guidelines are spread over multiple documents using different styles, and furthermore it requires considerable effort to verify whether a design will work well on the targeted device. We propose GUIDE2ux, a design environment that (1) identifies and shows usability problems automatically and (2) facilitates designers to verify their designs on the target device easily. With GUIDE2ux, we make design standards more accessible for designers and help them to improve and test the user experience of their designs.

The number of smart objects in our everyday life is steadily increasing. In this workshop we discuss how the interaction with these smart objects should be designed from various perspectives.

Model-driven development of user interfaces has become increasingly powerful in recent years. Unfortunately, model-driven approaches have the inherent limitation that they cannot handle the informal nature of some of the artifacts used in truly multidisciplinary user interface development such as storyboards, sketches, scenarios and personas. In this chapter, we present an approach and tool support for multidisciplinary user interface development bridging informal and formal artifacts in the design and development process. Key features of the approach are the usage of annotated storyboards, which can be connected to other models through an underlying meta-model, and cross-toolkit design support based on an abstract user interface model.

Prototypes are often used to clarify and evaluate design alternatives for a graphical user interface. They help stakeholders to decide on different aspects by making them visible and concrete. This is a highly iterative process in which the prototypes evolve into a design artifact that is close enough to the envisioned result to be implemented. People with different roles are involved in prototyping. Our claim is that integrated or inter-operable tools help design information propagate among people while prototyping and making the transition more accurately into the software development phase. We make a first step towards such a solution by offering a framework, GRIP, in which such a tool should fit. We conducted a preliminary evaluation of the framework by using it to classify existing tools for prototyping and implementing a limited prototyping tool, GRIP-it, which can be integrated into the overall process.

This paper describes a comparative study between the usage of low-fidelity and a high-fidelity prototyping for the creation of multi-user multi-touch interfaces. The multi-touch interface presented in this paper allows users to collaboratively search for existing multimedia content, create new compositions with this content, and finally integrate it in a layout for presenting it. The study we conducted consists of a series of parallel user tests using both low-fidelity and high-fidelity prototypes to inform the design of the multi-touch interface. Based on a comparison of the two test sessions, we found that one should be cautious in generalising high-level user interactions from a low towards a high-fidelity prototype. However, the low-fidelity prototype approach presented proved to be very valuable to generate design ideas concerning both high and low-level user interactions on a multi-touch tabletop. ispartof: pages:148-157 ispartof: NordiCHI '10 Proceedings of the 6th Nordic Conference on Human-Computer Interaction: Extending Boundaries pages:148-157 ispartof: NordiCHI 2010 location:Reykjavik, Iceland date:16 Oct - 20 Oct 2010 status: published

Multi-device user interface design mostly implies creating suitable interface for each targeted device, using a diverse set of design tools and toolkits. This is a time consuming activity, concerning a lot of repetitive design actions without support for reusing this effort in later designs. In this paper, we propose D-Macs: a design tool that allows designers to record their design actions across devices, to share these actions with other designers and to replay their own design actions and those of others. D-Macs lowers the burden in multi-device user interface design and can reduce the necessity for manually repeating design actions.

—Users often become frustrated when they are unable to understand and control a pervasive computing environment. Previous studies have shown that allowing users to pose why and why not questions about context-aware applications resulted in better understanding and stronger feelings of trust. Although why and why not questions have been used before to aid in debugging and to clarify graphical user interfaces, it is currently not clear how they can be integrated into pervasive computing systems. We explain in detail how we have extended an existing pervasive computing framework with support for why and why not questions. This resulted in PervasiveCrystal, a system for asking and answering why and why not questions in pervasive computing environments.

When creating applications that should be available on multiple computing platforms, designers have to cope with different design tools and user interface toolkits. Incompati- bilities between these design tools and toolkits make it hard to keep multi-device user interfaces consistent. This paper presents Jelly, a exible design environment that can target a broad set of computing devices and toolkits. Jelly enables designers to copy parts of a user interface from one device to another and to maintain the di erent user interfaces in con- cert using linked editing. Our approach lowers the burden of designing multi-device user interfaces by eliminating the need to switch between di erent design tools and by providing tool support for keeping the user interfaces consistent across di erent platforms and toolkits.

A typical pervasive application executes in a changing environment: people, computing resources, software services and network connections come and go continuously. A robust pervasive application needs adapt to this changing context as long as there is an appropriate rewiring strategy that guarantees correct behavior. We combine the MERODE modeling methodology with the ReWiRe framework for creating interactive pervasive applications that can cope with changing environments. The core of our approach is a consistent environment model, which is essential to create (re)configurable context-aware pervasive applications. We aggregate different ontologies that provide the required semantics to describe almost any target environment. We present a case study that shows a interactive pervasive application for media access that incorporates parental control on media content and can migrate between devices. The application builds upon models of the run-time environment represented as system states for dedicated rewiring strategies.

Efficient delivery of information in vehicular networks is crucial for the creation of useful and usable applications that need to cope with nomadic large-scale environments. Context-awareness is often key to improve efficiency of a vehicle network since it allows to make informed decisions on the data routing, data locality and data necessity for different moving objects. In this paper we show how the social network of vehicle residents, as part of the overall context, allows us to improve the information sharing in the vehicular network significantly. We demonstrate this by deploying a social ubiquitous-help-system (UHS) on top of a vehicular network. We analyze how UHS operates in a vehicular network using a network simulation of realistic large scale vehicular movement data and show that the social interactions increases the efficiency, relevance and quality of information in data delivery. ispartof: pages:1188-1194 ispartof: Proceedings of the 2010 ACM Symposium on Applied Computing pages:1188-1194 ispartof: SAC location:Sierre date:22 Mar - 26 Mar 2010 status: published