Panos Markopoulos

Connecting the family with awareness systems

Awareness systems have attracted significant research interest for their potential to support interpersonal relationships. Investigations of awareness systems for the domestic environment have suggested that such systems can help individuals stay in touch with dear friends or family and provide affective benefits to their users. Our research provides empirical evidence to refine and substantiate such suggestions. We report our experience with designing and evaluating the ASTRA awareness system, for connecting households and mobile family members. We introduce the concept of connectedness and its measurement through the Affective Benefits and Costs of communication questionnaire (ABC-Q). We inform results that testify the benefits of sharing experiences at the moment they happen without interrupting potential receivers. Finally, we document the role that lightweight, picture-based communication can play in the range of communication media available.

Keeping in touch with the family: home and away with the ASTRA awareness system

This paper describes research in supporting close family members living apart to keep in touch with each other. We introduce an awareness system for supporting lightweight social communication between mobile individuals and people at home. Communication is based on pictures, short messages and reachability information. A field test has provided empirical evidence that affective benefits, to this point only hypothesized by researchers in awareness systems, are indeed experienced by users of our system.

Assessing the effects of building social intelligence in a robotic interface for the home

This paper reports an exploration of the concept of social intelligence in the context of designing home dialogue systems for an Ambient Intelligence home. It describes a Wizard of Oz experiment involving a robotic interface capable of simulating several human social behaviours. Our results show that endowing a home dialogue system with some social intelligence will: (a) create a positive bias in the users perception of technology in the home environment, (b) enhance user acceptance for the home dialogue system, and (c) trigger social behaviours by the user in relation to the home dialogue system.

On the assessment of usability testing methods for children

The paper motivates the need to acquire methodological knowledge for involving children as test users in usability testing. It introduces a methodological framework for delineating comparative assessments of usability testing methods for children participants. This framework consists in three dimensions: (1) assessment criteria for usability testing methods, (2) characteristics describing usability testing methods and, finally, (3) characteristics of children that may impact upon the process and the result of usability testing. Two comparative studies are discussed in the context of this framework along with implications for future research.

Adaptive Persuasive Systems: A Study of Tailored Persuasive Text Messages to Reduce Snacking

This article describes the use of personalized short text messages (SMS) to reduce snacking. First, we describe the development and validation (N = 215) of a questionnaire to measure individual susceptibility to different social influence strategies. To evaluate the external validity of this Susceptibility to Persuasion Scale (STPS) we set up a two week text-messaging intervention that used text messages implementing social influence strategies as prompts to reduce snacking behavior. In this experiment (N = 73) we show that messages that are personalized (tailored) to the individual based on their scores on the STPS, lead to a higher decrease in snacking consumption than randomized messages or messages that are not tailored (contra-tailored) to the individual. We discuss the importance of this finding for the design of persuasive systems and detail how designers can use tailoring at the level of social influence strategies to increase the effects of their persuasive technologies.

Interaction design and children

This editorial paper introduces an emerging area for human–computer interaction research, which concerns interaction design and children. To avoid treating children as a homogeneous user group, it discusses some perspectives on their development, their use of technology for entertainment and education and, finally, how to involve children in the various stages of the design process.

pOwerball: the design of a novel mixed-reality game for children with mixed abilities

This paper presents the design of pOwerball, a novel augmented reality computer game for children aged 8-14. The pOwerball was designed to bring together children with and without a physical or learning disability and to encourage social interactions surrounding the play. The contribution of this design case is two fold. From a design perspective, pOwerball exemplifies an emerging class of computer games where the interaction style and game mechanics support social interactions amongst the players. From a methodological perspective, we describe the various ways children became involved in our design process; we highlight the related difficulties and successes in the context of relevant research literature.

GentleGuide: An Exploration of Haptic Output for Indoors Pedestrian Guidance

This paper describes an investigation into how haptic output can be used to deliver guidance to pedestrians, who do not have any particular disability, to find their way to a particular destination indoors, e.g., a room in a hospital. A prototype device called GentleGuide was designed iteratively, resolving several design issues for the use of haptic output. GentleGuide has been assessed experimentally. Our conclusion is that haptic output offers significant promise both in improving performance and in reducing the disruptiveness of technology. A negative aspect of exclusively relying on a device like GentleGuide is the reduced location and orientation awareness by some participants.

ADEPT: Advanced Design Environment for Prototyping with Task Models

ADEPT MODELS AND TOOLS ADEPT is a novel design environment for prototyping user interfaces which allows the designer to construct an explicit model of the tasks that the user and computer witl perform jointly. ADEPT incorporates task and user modelling components with a rapid prototyping user interface design tool to provide a user-task centred design environment. ADE~ encompasses design from task analysis to the generation of a run-time system through a number of modelling stages (Figure 1). The environment provides editors, browsers, interpreters and generators that atlow each of the models to be functionally employed in user interface design. The task modelling component of ADE~ provides the designer with a graphical editor which allows the designer to construct and browse models of the existing and proposed tasks described in terms of Task Knowledge Structures [1]. The output from the task modelling component feeds directly into the Abstract Interface Model (AIM) component. The AIM provides the designer with a high-level specification of the interaction, expressed in terms of the dialogue structure and abstract interaction objects. The designer can edit and elaborate the AIM using the editors and browsers of ADEIT. The Concrete Interface Model (CIM) is a platform independent description of the interface design at a detailed level of interaction objects, their behaviour and screen layout. A generator tool creates a default CIM which the designer can edit using the CIM tools. The generator is influenced by input of user centred design characteristics from the User Model. The user model is a rule base of design principles which are tailored by the designer with facts concerning the details of the intended user group. The interaction between the CIM generator and the User Modelling components is in the form of question/answer dkdogues which are carried out automatically during the generation process. The CIM may be translated into a platform dependent implementation which makes use of a standard widget set such as Open Lookm. Other platforms can be accommodated by writing alternative translators. Permission to copy without fee all or part of this material is granted provided that the copies are not made or distributed for direct commercial advantage, the ACM copyright notice and the title of tha publication and ite date appear, and notice is given that copying is by permission of the Association for Computing Machinery. To copy otherwise, or to republish, requires a fea and/or specific permission.

Head Up Games: combining the best of both worlds by merging traditional and digital play

Current pervasive games are mostly location-aware applications, played on handheld computing devices. Considering pervasive games for children, it is argued that the interaction paradigm existing games support limits essential aspects of outdoor play like spontaneous social interaction, physical movement, and rich face-to-face communication. We present a new genre of pervasive games conceived to address this problem, that we call “Head Up Games” (HUGs) to underline that they liberate players from facing down to attend to screen-based interactions. The article discusses characteristics of HUG and relates them to existing genres of pervasive games. We present lessons learned during the design and evaluation of three HUG and chart future challenges.