Kaisa Väänänen

Suitability of virtual prototypes to support human factors/ergonomics evaluation during the design.

In recent years, the use of virtual prototyping has increased in product development processes, especially in the assessment of complex systems targeted at end-users. The purpose of this study was to evaluate the suitability of virtual prototyping to support human factors/ergonomics evaluation (HFE) during the design phase. Two different virtual prototypes were used: augmented reality (AR) and virtual environment (VE) prototypes of a maintenance platform of a rock crushing machine. Nineteen designers and other stakeholders were asked to assess the suitability of the prototype for HFE evaluation. Results indicate that the system model characteristics and user interface affect the experienced suitability. The VE system was valued as being more suitable to support the assessment of visibility, reach, and the use of tools than the AR system. The findings of this study can be used as a guidance for the implementing virtual prototypes in the product development process.

User interfaces for hypermedia: how to find good metaphors?

Users of hypermedia are known to suffer from confision and loss of overview when navigating within the hyperspace. This is especially serious problem in public information systems where instant acceptance by non– computer+xperts must be ensured. Concrete real-world user interface metaphors can help solve these problems by imposing familiar structures and interaction possibilities and visualizing them to the user. This paper gives guidance to the hypermedia user interface designer in the task of selecting an appropriate metaphor.

Supporting Opportunities for Context-Aware Social Matching: An Experience Sampling Study

Mobile social matching systems aim to bring people together in the physical world by recommending people nearby to each other. Going beyond simple similarity and proximity matching mechanisms, we explore a proposed framework of relational, social and personal context as predictors of match opportunities to map out the design space of opportunistic social matching systems. We contribute insights gained from a study combining Experience Sampling Method (ESM) with 85 students of a U.S. university and interviews with 15 of these participants. A generalized linear mixed model analysis (n=1704) showed that personal context (mood and busyness) as well as sociability of others nearby are the strongest predictors of contextual match interest. Participant interviews suggest operationalizing relational context using social network rarity and discoverable rarity, and incorporating skill level and learning/teaching needs for activity partnering. Based on these findings we propose passive context-awareness for opportunistic social matching.

Minimum Viable User EXperience: A Framework for Supporting Product Design in Startups

Startups operate with small resources in time pressure. Thus, building minimal product versions to test and validate ideas has emerged as a way to avoid wasteful creation of complicated products which may be proven unsuccessful in the markets. Often, design of these early product versions needs to be done fast and with little advance information from end-users. In this paper we introduce the Minimum Viable User eXperience (MVUX) that aims at providing users a good enough user experience already in the early, minimal versions of the product. MVUX enables communication of the envisioned product value, gathering of meaningful feedback, and it can promote positive word of mouth. To understand what MVUX consists of, we conducted an interview study with 17 entrepreneurs from 12 small startups. The main elements of MVUX recognized are Attractiveness, Approachability, Professionalism, and Selling the Idea. We present the structured framework and elements’ contributing qualities.

Investigating mid-air gestures and handhelds in motion tracked environments

Smart spaces with multiple interactive devices and motion tracking capabilities are becoming more common. However, there is little research on how interaction with one device affects the usage of other devices in the space. We investigate the effects of mobile devices and physical interactive devices on gestural interaction in motion-tracked environments. For our user study, we built a smart space consisting of a gesture-controlled large display, an NFC reader and a mobile device, to simulate a system in which users can transfer information between the space and personal devices. The study with 13 participants revealed that (1) the mobile device affects gesturing as well as passive stance; (2) users may stop moving completely when they intend to stop interacting with a display; (3) interactive devices with overlapping interaction space make unintentional interaction significantly more frequent. Our findings give implications for gestural interaction design as well as design of motion-tracked smart spaces.

Multimedia environments: supporting authors and users with real-world metaphors

Ilk work investigates the processes of constructing and using multimedia information systems within the particular context of supporting real-world metaphors. It is recommended that authoring tools for multimedia environments should integrate mechanisms for both the design and implementation tasks. Furthermore, the tool should provide a set of real-world metaphon that suppoxt both the author in structuring the information, and the user in understanding and interacting with that information. By bringing the authoring and interaction processes closer together under a real-world metaphor, the author’s task in constructing a usable and engaging multimedia information system should be much simpler. This paper discusses this and illustrates the process by describing a system called ShareME Shared Multimedia Environments.

User Needs and Expectations for Future Traveling Services in Buses

Cities worldwide face the need to reduce the usage of private cars and the emissions. Desirability of public transportation and its services is thus of major importance. When developing novel services for public transportation, it is crucial to consider the user -- the traveler -- perspective. We present results of a qualitative study of user needs and expectations of future traveling services, with the focus on the bus and its potential associated services. We interviewed ten students living in Finland who had a broad range of experiences of public transportation in various parts of the world. Our findings reveal topics that can be used as a basis of digital services that support or enrich the traveling experience. The results provide insights for the design of services for future buses, including the user needs at the bus stop, the bus itself and external functionalities that could be linked to the bus ride.

Towards Understanding How Agile Teams Predict User Experience

In this chapter, we compare UX assessments of users and agile team members to learn to what extent developers can predict how users experience (UX) the product the developers are working on, and where user involvement is truly required. We compared UX assessments of agile team members (N = 26) and users (N = 29) of six enterprise applications with statistical tests. Moreover, we analyzed the data with principal component analysis to reveal the main dimensions of UX for enterprise software. Our results confirm prior research findings that agile team members can put themselves in the users’ position when evaluating instrumental aspects of UX of the software they are working on. However, it seems that developers cannot evaluate non-instrumental quality. Therefore, direct user involvement from participation to evaluation or other means to support user empathy in development process is needed. We recommend additional means, such as personas to help agile team members empathize with the users and their needs for non-instrumental qualities of the enterprise software.

Design-inclusive UX research: design as a part of doing user experience research

Since the third wave in human–computer interaction (HCI), research on user experience (UX) has gained momentum within the HCI community. The focus has shifted from systematic usability requirements and measures towards guidance on designing for experiences. This is a big change, since design has traditionally not played a large role in HCI research. Yet, the literature addressing this shift in focus is very limited. We believe that the field of UX research can learn from a field where design and experiential aspects have always been important: design research. In this article, we discuss why design is needed in UX research and how research that includes design as a part of research can support and advance UX design practice. We do this by investigating types of design-inclusive UX research and by learning from real-life cases of UX-related design research. We report the results of an interview study with 41 researchers in three academic research units where design research meets UX research. Based on our interview findings, and building on existing literature, we describe the different roles design can play in research projects. We also report how design research results can inform designing for experience methodologically or by providing new knowledge on UX. The results are presented in a structured palette that can help UX researchers reflect and focus more on design in their research projects, thereby tackling experience design challenges in their own research.

Early Product Design in Startups: Towards a UX Strategy

Startups often begin with minimal product versions to test and validate their product ideas as early as possible. Therefore, the first versions of the product need to be able to communicate the product idea to users in order to receive meaningful feedback. However, if user experience UX of the product is poor, users tend to concentrate on the disturbing user interface instead of the actual product idea. Thus, we suggest that startups should have a UX strategy from the beginning in order to understand their goals related to UX at different stages of product maturity. To this end, we conducted an interview study with eight Finland-based startups and 13 participants. Our results contribute towards understanding both needs for early UX design in startups as well as the restrictions for UX work that the scarce resources of startups induce. This work contributes to creating a UX strategy model for startups.