Elke Beck

Trends in the living room and beyond

Investigating the context home becomes more and more necessary for future developments of interactive TV services and of new interaction techniques. In this paper, findings from two ethnographic studies are presented. In these studies a new methodological variation of cultural probing called creative cultural probing (CCP) was developed. The aim of our research was to investigate activities and interaction techniques in the living room and beyond. In this paper, the results of the studies are presented and some major trends for the home context are highlighted. The studies indicate that supporting social interaction and personal activities as well as personalization, security and communication needs have to be addressed in the future more thoroughly.

Focusing on elderly: an iTV usability evaluation study with eye-tracking

Elderly people often experience difficulties using interactive TV. This paper presents the findings of a usability evaluation study in combination with eye-tracking conducted for an information oriented interactive TV application. We explored two user groups: elderly users (50 years and above) and users between 20 and 30 years of age. Our focus was on how elderly people perceive and interpret a navigation oriented iTV application. Apart from the standard usability data we used eye-tracking data to gain more insight on why iTV usage seemed to be more difficult for the group of elderly.

Formative User-Centered Evaluation of Security Modeling: Results from a Case Study

Developing a security modeling language is a complex activity. Particularly, it becomes very challenging for Security Requirements Engineering (SRE) languages where social/organizational concepts are used to represent high-level business aspects, while security aspects are typically expressed in a technical jargon at a lower level of abstraction. In order to reduce this socio-technical mismatch and reach a high quality outcome, appropriate evaluation techniques need to be chosen and carried out throughout the development process of the modeling language. In this article, we present and discuss the formative user-centered evaluation approach, namely an evaluation technique that starts since the early design stages and actively involves end-users. We demonstrate the approach in a real case study presenting the results of the evaluation. From the gained empirical evidence, we may conclude that formative user-centered evaluation is highly recommended to investigate any security modeling language.

Gaming to sit safe: the restricted body as an integral part of gameplay

This paper presents a design exploration of full-body interaction games played in cars. It describes how we have designed, implemented, and evaluated the core experiences of three different games, which were all aimed at making sitting properly more fun for players/children while travelling by car. By making the restricted body an integral part of gameplay, we hope to, as a side product of gameplay, bring about the best and also most safe body posture for young players/children travelling by car, i.e., sitting reasonably upright and still in their child seat with their head leaning back on the neck rest. Another outcome of this could also be an overall safer situation in the car, in that children not sitting still in their child seats while being driven might be stressful for the driver. By presenting the details of our design efforts in this particular design context, we hope to add also to the knowledge we, in HCI, have for how to design bodily experiences with technology at large.

Local communities and IPTV: Lessons learned in an early design and development phase

Local communities are communities that have relationships in real life due to the physical location of their households. IPTV can be a way to support these local communities (either in their establishment, in fostering relationships, or even in extending these local communities). Through a two-year research process, requirements for IPTV as support for local communities were investigated and IPTV services were developed and evaluated. In this article, findings and lessons learned from the early design and development phase of a specific case study are presented. The findings show that support for local communities must take communication structures into account, balance real life and online community support, while at the same time it must also provide for more fun and entertaining aspects.

Robotic systems in health care

This paper reflects on a novel concept of robotization in the health care sector. The idea is to design a robotic system capable of performing remote physical examination with palpation (i.e., pressing a patients stomach to identify pain regions and stiffness of organs) and ultrasonography. The medical robotic system will consist of a remote haptic interface for the doctor and a robot located at the patients side supported by an assistant. In two countries (Austria and Poland), we conducted first focus groups with doctors in order to identify how the remote medical diagnostician system is assessed and conceptualized regarding the examination procedures (activities), communication issues, and the visualization of needed information. Based on the findings, we will reflect on the technology assessment, i.e., if remote medical services can be a suitable possibility for rural areas where the availability of doctors with various specializations is often a problem, as well as necessities for this novel type of medical treatment from a doctors point of view (i.e., identified aspects increasing acceptance and adoption by users of the system).

Now you need to laugh!: investigating fun in games with children

Up to now interaction in desktop games is mostly limited to keyboard and mouse input. This paper describes a desktop game, which uses emotional facial expressions as an additional input channel for creating a virtual flower in a digital universe. The game is being developed for children between 8 and 14 years old and was evaluated in a three-day field study with almost 300 children in the context of a shopping mall. The results show that more than two-thirds of the participants had fun playing the game. This was also confirmed by the high willingness to replay the game. Moreover, the study showed that the game provides the right amount of challenge to the players; it is approximately equally difficult for younger and older children.

Usability & User Experience: Preliminary Results from Evaluating an IPTV Community Platform

The promises of IPTV and related changes of the traditional TV environment are broadly discussed in the EuroiTV community. In this paper we present preliminary, qualitative results from a user evaluation conducted for an IPTV community platform focusing on usability and user experience issues. Our results show that major obstacles in the first phase of developing an IPTV community application are the usability of the system as well as the motivation of people to share personal audiovisual content.

How Will Software Engineers of the Internet of Things Reason about Trust

The Internet of Things (IoT) will consist of everyday physical objects communicating with each other via massively distributed service-oriented architectures (SOAs). One neglected area of research is how engineers developing software underlying the IoT will decide whether the services they use and compose are trustworthy. We sketch how a formal socio-cognitive theory of trust can guide empirical research on the topic, and report preliminary results from 25 engineers who were asked how they currently reason about software component trustworthiness.

Characteristics of narrative textual data linked to user experiences

While we can rely on a wide variety of techniques and methods from human and social sciences to collect narratives within human-computer interaction, the knowledge about the specific characteristics of this source and their systematic use for user experience (UX) research is limited. In this paper we argue that it is crucial to pay more attention to the specifics of narrative textual data. Building on the approaches developed by the sociologists Schütze and Flick, we emphasize the need for developing a classification of textual data, in order to provide a theoretical foundation for narrative practices in UX research. In the following, we present four different text types for structuring textual data and their relevance regarding user experiences. This paper represents an initial step towards a more systematic and theory driven perspective on narratives, supporting a structured collection and analysis of textual data in UX research.