Valentina Volpi

UX and Usability on Smart TV: A Case Study on a T-commerce Application

Smart TVs offers new possibilities of interaction, due to the peculiarity of the device and the presence of apps. However, more usability studies on Smart TV apps are needed in order to improve the quality of the user interfaces. So, in this paper the authors focus on the interaction between user and Smart TV through remote control. In detail, they test with the users an e-commerce (or more specifically, t-commerce) application on Smart TV.

A Usability Study of a Gesture Recognition System Applied During the Surgical Procedures

Within an operating room, surgeons need to interact with a large amount of patient’s medical information and data. In order to avoid misunderstandings among the staff and protecting the patient safety, the medical staff may use a touchless interaction system that allows the surgeons to directly interact with digital devices that visualize digital images. The RISO project aims to create a gesture recognition system for the visualization and manipulation of medical images, useful for the surgeons even during the surgical procedures. In this paper we show the main findings from a usability study carried out with the aim to evaluate, among others, the learnability of the system and the memorability of the gestures employed for the interaction.

Elderly and Tablets: Considerations and Suggestions About the Design of Proper Applications

In this paper, the authors support the idea that tablet is the ideal tool to assist and enhance the elderly living by providing them with value-added services. Currently the risk is that a poor design interface may exclude this substantial part of the population from using useful technologies because of their specific age category requirements. So, after an analysis of the related academic literature and an assessment both of elderly needs and tablet limits and potential, the authors select a set of considerations and suggestions for the design of tablet applications for elderly, in order to facilitate the interaction.

Improving Quality of Interaction with the Mobility Services Through the Gamification Approach

The evolution of mobility sector towards a multimodal and multi-service approach enables new possibilities of interaction for travellers. At once it creates a complex ecosystem where the final users are one of the main key components for the effectiveness and the success of the deployed mobility strategies and solutions. It implies that, both for academic and commercial purposes, a remarkable attention should be put on the design approaches focusing on human aspects in interactive systems. Moreover different methods aiming at enhancing the user experience should be exploited, in order to trigger desirable and worthy innovations. So in this paper we focus on gamification for improving the quality of interaction with the mobility services. In effect, mobility represents a more and more promising domain for the application of playful solutions, although in this field it is nowadays employed mostly for incentivizing smart and sustainable behaviours, also in combination with crowdsourcing. However we can suppose a wider use of this approach in the mobility services, e.g. to improve the overall traveller experience and to increase an active collaboration among the stakeholders. In detail, in this paper we will discuss three main variables to identify which possibilities can emerge in future mobility services by applying a gamification approach: the different stages of a journey, for better knowing the contexts of action and the needs of people potentially interested in; the devices to be exploited, for better accomplishing gamification purposes; the game components, for better understanding how they contribute to fulfill the traveller objectives.

Citizen Involvement in Public Services Design: The SPAC3 Case Study

In the last years new relational systems between citizens and Institutions have been arising. One of the main effects of such transformation is an increasing citizen engagement in designing public services. The motivations, modes, and effects concerning this practice are relevant research topics addressing political, social, and economic issues. In this paper the authors present the SPAC3 project, as it involved the citizens in the design process. The project aims to allow families of the Municipality of Bergamo Italy to access services and information dedicated to them in a more effective way. Here, the authors will focus on the analysis carried out in the project, by pointing out the methodology and the main achieved outcomes, and the features of the identified solution. In the end, the SPAC3 project has been a good opportunity to think about the complex relationship between citizens and Institutions in order to strengthen it.

Playful Interactions for the Citizens’ Engagement. The Musical Language as a Possible Application

The human side of the city is taking more and more importance. It allows to create a positive human experience and to evaluate what people feel and what are their emotions in the city during the interaction with services and spaces. Moreover, in order to make the cities more “human”, an active citizens’ involvement in design processes is more and more considered as a necessary factor. However, the mere existence of tools that can engage people does not ensure real and effective actions. This work proposes to consider the dissemination of game elements in the city environment (exploiting the physical affordances of the urban pattern) as a possible approach to enhance the citizens’ engagement, and discusses the related technological and interaction issues. The musical language is proposed as a possible language related to the game context that we would apply to city for engagement purposes in the urban environment.

Rethinking Public Transport Services for the Elderly Through a Transgenerational Design Approach

In discussing the city suitability to people’s needs, generally a special attention has been given to people with special needs, e.g. the elderly. In this sense, most of the research about accessible cities has focused on the architectural design of public spaces, aiming at ensuring the access to urban places through the removal of architectural barriers. However, as technologies have been diffusing in many different city services, it also should be given attention to the constraints derived from this unavoidable change affecting the elderly life. The focus is on the potential of the technologies for improving the elderly city experience. In this paper the authors, starting from the principles of the transgenerational design, focus on how the technologies applied to the public transportation services could improve citizen experience and promote really inclusive mobility services.

The City as an Interface Between Citizens and Public Administrations

The widespread of ICTs has been transforming the physical city. This process has been definitely influencing people’s experiences within the urban environment creating new public spaces of interaction, affecting the physical and social urban structures. So, the city can be considered as an interface embedding different relational systems. In this perspective, Public Administration may benefit from the emergence of new interaction patterns for reinforcing the relationship with citizens. In effect, as the success of any public initiative appears to be strongly influenced by human aspects, Public Administrations should use the city interface to facilitate the communication and the collaboration with citizens. This paper aims to reflect on the interactive systems connecting citizens and Public Administration within the public sphere, and on the emergence of new perspectives and relations among people and urban places, in order to suppose new types of public touchpoints and interfaces supporting a sustainable city development.

Thinking Smart City with a Focus on Emerging Identity Elements

In this paper we agree that the identity of a city is continuously redefined by emergent properties expressed through environmental transformation. So we identify and emphasize some elements that may help designers to appropriately consider the continuously changing state of a city. After the exploration and identification of codes and languages derived from collective actions, we identify and illustrate three examples in order to sustain our thesis: the re-semantization of specific city elements, the boundary conditions as source of system change, and the unconventional social behaviors as lurking soft protests. We conclude by sustaining that the knitting of the “traces” of the emergent properties is a precondition for the smart city design.