No description available.

An increasing number of people interact not only with computers, but through computers. Interaction between people through computers to complete work tasks is termed Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW). The scope of activities supported by CSCW systems is described, and CSCW systems which support communication, meetings and writing are discussed. More specifically, the potential for improved computer support of the writing task is investigated. It is concluded that models of the writing task and writers are not yet sufficiently accurate to be embedded in normative computer programs or systems; individual writers and writing tasks are extremely varied. Leading on from the studies of both existing systems and writing theories, requirements for generic CSCW systems, single author support systems and multiple author support systems are presented. The design of CSCW systems which support asynchronous collaborative authoring of structured documents is investigated in this thesis. A novel approach to design and implementation of such systems is described and discussed. This thesis then describes MILO, a system that does not feature embedded models of writers or the writing task. In fact, MILO attempts to minimize constraints on the activities of collaborating authors and on the structure of documents. Hence with MILO, roles of participants are determined by social processes, and the presentational structure of documents is imposed at the end of the writing process. It is argued that this approach results in a workable, practical and useful design, substantiating the view that 'minimally-constrained' CSCW systems, of which MILO is an example, will be successful. It is shown that MILO successfully meets the stated requirements, and that it compares favourably with existing collaborative writing systems along several dimensions. The limitations of work presented in the thesis are discussed, leading to suggestions for future work which will remedy deficiencies and extend the work which has been undertaken. The nature of this thesis's contribution to CSCW in general, computer supported collaborative writing, and Human Computer Interaction (HCI) is discussed.

No description available.

<p>Virtual assistants such as Amazon's Alexa can emulate a variety of emotions in their spoken feedback to user requests. The persuasive impact of these emotional displays depends on the inferences individuals make about these emotional displays. This dissertation investigates a class of inferences –attributions of cause to a virtual assistant's emotional display –which individuals use as social information about computer-interactants. The project hypothesized that three key factors influence individuals' attributions of cause to virtual assistants' emotional displays. The first is general tendencies in peoples' attributions of virtual assistants' emotional displays. Second is the target of a virtual assistant's emotional display –the communicated object of their displayed emotional state. The final component is borrowed from Kelley's covariance theory of attribution –the distinctiveness with which a specific emotional display repeatedly co-occurs with plausible explanations for the emotional display. Four attributional outcomes were predicted based on combinations of emotional display targets and the distinctiveness of the emotional display's covariance with potential causes for the emotional display. Findings suggest that individuals first and foremost attribute virtual assistant's emotional displays to the virtual assistant rather than situational causes, that emotional display targets can influence attributions, and that further work is needed to assess the role of distinctiveness in attributions of virtual assistant's emotional displays.</p>

No description available.

As the beneficial aspects of computers become more apparent to the elderly population and the baby boom generation moves into later adulthood there is opportunity to increase performance for older computer users. Performance decrements that occur naturally to the motor skills of older adults have shown to have a negative effect on interactions with indirect-manipulation devices, such as computer mice (Murata & Iwase, 2005). Although, a mouse will always have the traits of an indirect-manipulation interaction, the inclusion of additional sensory feedback likely increases the saliency of the task to the real world resulting in increases in performance (Biocca et al., 2002). There is strong evidence for a bimodal advantage that is present in people of all ages; additionally there is also very strong evidence that older adults are a group that uses extra sensory information to increase their everyday interactions with the environment (Cienkowski & Carney, 2002; Thompson & Malloy, 2004). This study examined the effects of having multimodal feedback (i.e., visual cues, auditory cues, and tactile cues) present during a target acquisition mouse task for young, middle-aged, and older experienced computer users. This research examined the performance and subjective attitudes when performing a mouse based pointing task when different combinations of the modalities were present. The inclusion of audio or tactile cues during the task had the largest positive effect on performance, resulting in significantly quicker task completion for all of the computer users. The presence of audio or tactile cues increased performance for all of the age groups; however the performance of the older adults tended to be positively influenced more than the other age groups due the inclusion of these modalities. Additionally, the presence of visual cues did not have as strong of an effect on overall performance in comparison to the other modalities. Although the presence of audio and tactile feedback both increased performance there was evidence of a speed accuracy trade-off. Both the audio and tactile conditions resulted in a significantly higher number of misses in comparison to having no additional cues or visual cues present. So, while the presence of audio and tactile feedback improved the speed at which the task could be completed this occurred due to a sacrifice in accuracy. Additionally, this study shows strong evidence that audio and tactile cues are undesirable to computer users. The findings of this research are important to consider prior to adding extra sensory modalities to any type of user interface. The idea that additional feedback is always better may not always hold true if the feedback is found to be distracting, annoying, or negatively affects accuracy, as was found in this study with audio and tactile cues.

In the United States, notice and choice remain the most commonly used mechanisms to protect people’s privacy online. This approach relies on the assumption that users provided with notice will make informed choices that align with their privacy expectations. The goal of this research is to empirically inform industry and regulatory efforts that rely on notice and choice to protect people’s online privacy. To do so, we present a set of case studies covering different aspects of privacy notice and choice in four domains: online behavioral advertising (OBA), online social networks (OSN), financial privacy notices, and websites’ machine-readable privacy notices. We investigate users’ privacy preferences, information needs, and ability to exercise choices in the OBAdomain. Based on our results, we provide recommendations to improve the design of notice and choice methods currently in use in this domain. In the context of OSNs, we explore the effect of nudging notices designed to encourage more thoughtful disclosures among Facebook users and recommend changes to the Facebook user interface aimed to mitigate problematic disclosures. We demonstrate how standardized notices enable large-scale evaluations and comparisons of companies’ privacy practices and argue that standardized privacy notices have an enormous potential to improve transparency and benefit users, privacy-respectful companies, and oversight entities. We argue that, in today’s complex Internet ecosystem, an approach that relies on users to make privacy decisions should also empower them with user-friendly interfaces, relevant information, and the tools they need to make privacy decisions. Finally, we further argue that notice and choice are necessary, but not sufficient to protect online privacy, and that government regulation is necessary to establish necessary additional protections including access, redress, accountability, and enforcement.

<div>With rapidly increasing mobile computing devices and high speed networks, large amounts of digital information and intelligence from the surrounding environment have been introduced into our everyday life. However, much of the context and content is in textual and in 2D. To access the digital contents spontaneously, augmented reality~(AR) has become a promising surrogate to bridge the physical with the digital world. Thanks to the vast improvement to the personal computing devices, AR technologies are emerging in realistic scenarios. Commercially available software development kits~(SDKs) and hardware platforms have started to expose AR applications to a large population. </div><div> </div><div>In a broader level, this thesis focuses on investigating suitable interactions metaphors for the evolving AR. In particular, this work leverages the spatial awareness in AR environment to enable spatially-aware interactions. This work explores (i) spatial inputs around AR devices using the local spatial relationship between the AR devices and the scene, (ii) spatial interactions within the surrounding environment exploiting the global spatial relationship among multiple users as well as between the users and the environment. In this work, I mainly study four spatially-aware AR interactions: (i) 3D tangible interactions by directly mapping input to the continuous and discrete volume around the device, (ii) 2D touch input in 3D context by projecting the screen input to the real world, (iii) location aware interactions which use the locations of the real/virtual objects in the AR scene as spatial references, and (iv) collaborative interactions referring to a commonly shared AR scene. This work further develop the enabling techniques including a magnetic sensing based 3D tracking of tangible devices relative to a handheld AR device, a projection based 3D sketching technique for in-situ AR contents creation, a localization method for spatially mapping the smart devices into the AR scene, and a registration approach for resolving the transformations between multiple SLAM AR devices. Moreover, I build systems towards allowing pervasive AR experiences. Primarily, I develop applications for increasing the flexibility of AR contents manipulation, creation and authoring, intuitively interacting with the smart environment, and spontaneously collaborating within a co-located AR scene.</div><div> </div><div>The main body of the research has contributed to multiple on-going collaborative projects. I briefly discuss the key results and visions from these projects including (i) autonomous robotic exploration and mapping of smart environment where the spatial relationship between the robot and the smart devices is resolved, and (ii) human-robot-interaction in AR where the spatial intelligence can be seamlessly exchanged between the human and the robot. Further, I suggest future research projects leveraging three critical features from AR, namely situatedness, mobility, and the capability to support spatial collaborations.</div>

The phenomenon of mental models has long been studied in both cognitive science and HCI, yet their impact in knowledge transfer between user interfaces are not as commonly studied. Rarely are practical examples of this phenomenon studied from an academic perspective. Using a real world example, Skatteverket’s (Swedish tax authorities) information system Basregister, this case study seeks to explore the role of mental models in knowledge transfer between user interfaces. Method of investigation entailed utilizing two design iterations, three interview phases, and five participants employed at Skatteverket. This study investigated if, and how much design elements from well-known external- and the original- system impact the acquisition of new mental models for the newly produced user interface designs. Main results conclude that both external and internal design elements may be to tremendous benefit when the goal is to design with maximum knowledge transfer, as to reduce cognitive load on the user. However, that such implementations should be carefully instigated when designing new UI, and always from a user-centric approach.

L'Internet des Objets, dont la vision et les technologies provoquent la rencontre des mondes physique et numérique, amène aujourd'hui à la création de nouveaux types d'applications permettant d'interopérer les services du World Wide Web avec les produits du quotidien. Ces applications « orientées produit », capables de représenter, contrôler ou de compléter les fonctions d'artéfacts intégrant des capacités de traitement de l'information, remettent en cause les principes et conventions établies par les métiers de la conception. Elles préfigurent l'émergence de produits connectés à Internet, dont l'offre fonctionnelle peut être « augmentée » et modifiée au cours du temps, de manière à répondre aux besoins changeants des utilisateurs. Cette recherche, menée à l'intersection des sciences de la conception, de l'informatique ubiquitaire et des interactions homme-machine, vise à étudier les enjeux que suscitent ces applications lors la conception de produits. Elle met en exergue la nécessité d'établir un modèle descriptif des applications orientées produit facilitant leur figuration par les utilisateurs, ainsi que d'explorer les problèmes pragmatiques résultant de leur intégration dans les produits. Elle conduit également à l'élaboration et l'évaluation, par la pratique, de principes pour le design de la forme et des interactions des produits augmentés. Elle décrit plus particulièrement la ductilité de futurs produits, le nouveau rapport entre fonction, comportement et structure qu'ils établissent, et leurs possibles évolutions. Cette recherche contribue aux travaux sur l'Internet des Objets en proposant un nouveau cadre de discussion, et en offrant aux chercheurs et aux praticiens des outils qui peuvent être employés durant le processus de conception. / The Internet of Things, whose underlying vision and technologies aim at bridging the physical and digital worlds together, lead to the creation of new types of applications coupling Web services with everyday products. Such product-oriented applications, which enable the functional exposition, control or enhancement of artifacts that embed information processing capabilities, question the established design principles and conventions. They open up the possibility for Internet-enabled products, whose functions can be “augmented” and adapted to better support users' changing needs, to be designed. This research, which is at the intersection of Design Science, Ubiquitous Computing and Human-Computer Interactions, aims at studying the impact brought about by applications on product design. It highlights the need to build an application model that facilitates their representation by users, and to explore the pragmatic issues rose by their integration into products. It leads to the definition and evaluation, through practice, of principles for the design of augmented products' form and interactions. It describes the ductility of future products, the novel coupling between functions, behavior and structure they implement and their potential evolutions. This work contributes to the Internet of Things research by reframing the discussion and by providing researchers and practitioners with tools that can be leveraged during the design process.