Calvin Mtichell Ongkingco, Conception and Implementation of Routing Algorithm for Accessible Walking Routes for People with Mobility Impairments, University of Zurich, Faculty of Business, Economics and Informatics, 2022. (Master's Thesis)
Mobility in our environment is one of the crucial things we think about when choosing places and finding things to do. However, this can be difficult for individuals with reduced mobility as they need to know the environment in advance to find accessible paths and navigate their way around. Information regarding route accessibility using routing applications is not always available, making it difficult for people with reduced mobility to be independent. Geographical attributes that work for one set of users would differ from another as preferences can differ for each individual. This paper provides a design and implementation of a web-based application that helps improve the mobility independence of users within a given environment with consideration of the user preferences. weMove is a route planning tool that provides users with recommended routes based on their preferences. weMove also provides a simulation environment and analysis tool using the concept of Wheelchair Accessibility Cost in determining the route score that can be useful in evaluating accessible routes for pedestrians with reduced mobility along with the requirements of user-profiles with reduced mobility that can improve accessibility and routing within the built environment. |
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Karim Abou el Naga, RedactTogether, University of Zurich, Faculty of Business, Economics and Informatics, 2021. (Bachelor's Thesis)
Qualitative research explores areas that are important to a lot of different people. Especially for health care and understanding human life, extensive studies need to be conducted. Compared to quantitative studies, it is often not as straightforward for qualitative studies. The collected data cannot be plotted or visualized in a standardized manner; in fact, individual interviews have to be taken with a fitting target group. Guiding such interviews is an intense process for both researcher and the respective participants. Not only is it about gathering information, but the data must also be stored accordingly. This is done by transcribing an interview. The goal is to produce this transcript as an artifact that results from the interview. The transcripts hold different levels of granularity when it comes to their precision. A transcript could store every said word, supported by time stamps and at best also auditive files, but could also be fragmentary, as there may be issues that occurred while transcribing. Nonetheless, it is good practice to perform a so-called member check after interview sessions. The goal is to allow the participant to go over the transcript to request changes. Those changes could be of any nature; it may be that some personal data should be anonymized (e.g., gender), but it could also be that a complete text passage is put out of context. After the member check is complete, a researcher usually uses the transcripts for the studies. Eventually, the studies will be published. New researchers who conduct a study by themselves may be interested in those publications. However, if a transcript is member checked and data is anonymized or changed, the study may not be trustworthy anymore and cannot be used as a reference. This thesis presents a possible way to tackle this problem. With "RedactTogether" a prototype was implemented that allows researchers and participants to perform the member check through a dedicated web application. The challenges that occur when working with real-time collaborative text editors were analyzed and the nature of member checks. Furthermore, the perspective of a third-party researcher who reads member-checked transcripts was considered. With that, a prototype resulted, which follows the goal of laying a foundation in this area. This foundation can be used to explore this field and also to be presented to potential stakeholders.
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Natalia Obukhova, A Meta-Analysis of Effect Sizes of CHI Typing Experiments, In: Extended Abstracts of the 2021 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, ACM Digital Library, New York, NY, USA, 2021-05-08. (Conference or Workshop Paper published in Proceedings)
While designing an HCI experiment, planning the sample size with a priori power analysis is often skipped due to the lack of reference effect sizes. On the one hand, it can lead to a false-negative result, missing the effect that is present in the population. On the other hand, it poses a risk of spending more resources if the number of participants is too high. In this work, I present the reference for small, medium, and large effect sizes for typing experiments based on a meta-analysis of well-cited papers from CHI conference. This effect size ruler can be used to conduct a priori power analysis or assess the magnitude of the found effect. This work also includes comparisons to other fields and conclude with a discussion of the existing issues with reporting practices and data availability. This paper and all data and materials are freely available at https://osf.io/nqzpr. |
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Xiaoyi Wang, Alexander Eiselmayer, Wendy E Mackay, Kasper Hornbæk, Chatchavan Wacharamanotham, Argus: Interactive a priori Power Analysis, IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics, Vol. 27 (2), 2021. (Journal Article)
A key challenge HCI researchers face when designing a controlled experiment is choosing the appropriate number of participants, or sample size. A priori power analysis examines the relationships among multiple parameters, including the complexity associated with human participants, e.g., order and fatigue effects, to calculate the statistical power of a given experiment design. We created Argus, a tool that supports interactive exploration of statistical power: Researchers specify experiment design scenarios with varying confounds and effect sizes. Argus then simulates data and visualizes statistical power across these scenarios, which lets researchers interactively weigh various trade-offs and make informed decisions about sample size. We describe the design and implementation of Argus, a usage scenario designing a visualization experiment, and a think-aloud study. |
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Peter Giger, DeepEq - An educational platform to help students develop a mathematical intuition for deep learning, University of Zurich, Faculty of Business, Economics and Informatics, 2021. (Master's Thesis)
Understanding the flow of gradients in deep learning is essential. Without a gradient, there is no learning in an artificial neural network. Platforms such as Cognimates and Google’s TensorFlow Playground lower the barriers to machine learning and encourage users to tinker with different parameters. However, these platforms often hide the inner workings and equations of the algorithms. Backpropagation and gradient descent, the workhorses behind deep learning, remain hidden from the students. For this reason, I’ve created DeepEq, an educational platform to help students develop a mathematical intuition for deep learning. DeepEq allows users to create a small neural network by joining perceptrons, automatically provides the underlying equations, and lets users implement their own backpropagation algorithm. A complementary interactive tutorial based on the 4C/ID model serves as a guide throughout the learning process. |
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Sven Stoll, AccessComplete: A Crowdsourcing App for Wheelchair Related Accessibility Data on OpenStreetMap, University of Zurich, Faculty of Business, Economics and Informatics, 2020. (Master's Thesis)
Being able to travel independently from one location to another is an important quality of life dimension. However, for mobility-impaired people, especially wheelchair users, this task can be very challenging. Past projects tried to address this situation by developing navigation systems that attempt to generate wheelchair accessible routes. In this context, geodata from the crowdsourcing project OpenStreetMap (OSM) are playing an increasingly important role. However, despite the fact that the OSM community has defined conventions to map wheelchair routing related accessibility data, its availability is still very low in most regions.
To improve this situation, this thesis presents both a concept and a prototypical software implementation of an Android app called AccessComplete that can be used by lay users without OSM knowledge to collect the missing data. A quest system allows users to contribute information regarding the surface material, smoothness quality, minimum width, and maximum incline of footpaths. Furthermore, it is possible to collect information about curb types on pedestrian crossings. Although the presented concept also shows how other types of barriers could be reported, this has not been implemented in the software prototype, yet. In a qualitative evaluation that involved usability tests with nine participants based on the think-aloud methodology, it could be shown that AccessComplete can fulfill the goal of being useable by people without previous knowledge of OSM. |
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Chia-Kai Yang, Chatchavan Wacharamanotham, Asymmetric effect of text-chart proximity on reading behavior, In: The 11th Nordic Conference on Human-Computer Interaction: Shaping Experiences, Shaping Society (NordiCHI ’20), ACM, New York, NY, USA, 2020-10-25. (Conference or Workshop Paper published in Proceedings)
Statistical charts complement textual reports by visualizing overall patterns or relations in the data. However, layout algorithms may place charts far from their associated text. Such distant placement can cause reading difficulties, or worse, a misinterpretation. We conducted an eye-tracking experiment comparing reading behaviors in two proximity levels: Placing text and chart on the same page, versus placing them on two different pages. The results indicate that the proximity influences text-reading stronger than chart-reading behavior. We discuss design implications for text-chart layout algorithms and practices. This paper and all data and materials are freely available at https://osf.io/xunt9. |
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Tobias Boner, ICSEQ An eye-tracking visual analytics app, University of Zurich, Faculty of Business, Economics and Informatics, 2020. (Bachelor's Thesis)
The domain of eye-tracking research has gained immense attention in recent times.
For the analysis of eye-tracking studies, researchers have to deal with data growing in complexity and size.
Thus, it is essential that they are supported by systems facilitating the analysis and exploration of eye-tracking data.
While there are various aspects of eye-tracking data that can be investigated, many researchers are interested in gaze sequences and try to reveal sequential patterns and viewing strategies that underlie the participants' behaviors.
Depending on the analytical tasks to be performed and the researcher's goal, either a top-down or bottom-up approach will be followed during the analysis of eye-tracking data.
Within the scope of this thesis, a visual analytics app is built to assist researchers in their analysis of eye-tracking data.
The goal of the app is to include various visualization techniques and user interactions that provide assistance for a top-down analysis as well as for a bottom-up analysis.
Hence, researchers can rely on the app for their analysis regardless of the analytical approach they pursue.
This thesis introduces the key aspects of the application and related eye-tracking research and concepts.
It covers the architecture of the app and evaluates its main features that were implemented using an exemplary eye-tracking data set. |
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Chia-Kai Yang, Identifying Reading Patterns with Eye-tracking Visual Analytics, In: ETRA '20: 2020 Symposium on Eye Tracking Research and Applications, ACM, New York, NY, USA, 2020. (Conference or Workshop Paper published in Proceedings)
Eye-tracking studies can yield insight into patterns of reading strategies, but identifying patterns in eye-tracking visualizations is a cognitively demanding task. My dissertation explores how visual analytics approaches support analysts detecting sequential patterns in the eye tracking data. To demonstrate the effectiveness of our visual analytics, I apply it to the datasets from a series of eye-tracking studies, and gather an empirical understanding about how research articles are read on paper and other media. |
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Chia-Kai Yang, Tanja Blascheck, Chatchavan Wacharamanotham, A Comparison of a Transition-based and a Sequence-based Analysis of AOI Transition Sequences, In: ETRA '20: 2020 Symposium on Eye Tracking Research and Applications, ACM, New York, NY, USA, 2020-07-02. (Conference or Workshop Paper published in Proceedings)
Several visual analytics (VA) systems are used for analyzing eye-tracking data because they synergize human-in-the-loop exploration with speed and accuracy of the computer. In the VA systems, the choices of visualization techniques could afford discovering certain types of insights while hindering others. Understanding these affordances and hindrances is essential to design effective VA systems. In this paper, we focus on two approaches for visualizing AOI transitions: the transition based approach (exemplified by the radial transition graph, RTG) and the sequence-based approach (exemplified by the Alpscarf). We captured the insights generated by two analysts who individually use each visualization technique on the same dataset. Based on the results, we identify four phases of analytic activities and discuss opportunities that the two visualization approaches can complement each other. We point out design implications for VA systems that combine these visualization approaches. |
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Alexander Eiselmayer, Supporting the Design and Analysis of HCI Experiments, In: CHI '20: CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, ACM, New York, NY, USA, 2020. (Conference or Workshop Paper published in Proceedings)
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Chatchavan Wacharamanotham, Lukas Eisenring, Steve Haroz, Florian Echtler, Transparency of CHI Research Artifacts: Results of a Self-Reported Survey, In: Proceedings of the 2020 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, ACM Digital Library, New York, NY, USA, 2020-04-25. (Conference or Workshop Paper published in Proceedings)
Several fields of science are experiencing a ""replication crisis"" that has negatively impacted their credibility. Assessing the validity of a contribution via replicability of its experimental evidence and reproducibility of its analyses requires access to relevant study materials, data, and code. Failing to share them limits the ability to scrutinize or build-upon the research, ultimately hindering scientific progress.Understanding how the diverse research artifacts in HCI impact sharing can help produce informed recommendations for individual researchers and policy-makers in HCI. Therefore, we surveyed authors of CHI 2018-2019 papers, asking if they share their papers' research materials and data, how they share them, and why they do not. The results (34% response rate) show that sharing is uncommon, partly due to misunderstandings about the purpose of sharing and reliable hosting. We conclude with recommendations for fostering open research practices.This paper and all data and materials are freely available at https://osf.io/3bu6t. |
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Caroline Lottenbach, Exploring the Landscape of WISE Improving the Usability of a complex Medical System, University of Zurich, Faculty of Business, Economics and Informatics, 2019. (Master's Thesis)
The goal of this thesis was to improve the usability of a Web-based Interdisciplinary Symptom Evaluation system (WISE) which has been developed and used by the orofacial pain clinic of the University of Zurich. WISE, as its name suggests, is a web-based tool, that captures and assess the interdisciplinary complaints of patients who suffer from orofacial pain.
The underlying difficulty in improving the system was that with anonymity of health care patients, we couldn't get personal feedback from the main user group. We used two different approaches to evaluate the underlying survey concept and reveal possible problem areas. The first approach was the well-established approach of evaluating the existing user feedback. We then developed a hands-on approach to create a paper-based survey logic diagram. This has proven especially helpful to analyse this large and complex questionnaire.
We found that the length and complexity was the biggest weakness of the old WISE survey. To address these problems, we reorganized the survey structure, eliminated superfluous questions, simplified the survey vocabulary, and updated the welcome page of the survey. We also corrected flaws in the survey logic and included more open-ended questions such that patients would be able to describe their problems in their own words. We addressed usability problems of certain question types through prototyping and user testing.
The main contribution of this thesis includes all improvements that were made to the WISE survey. The description of the approach to create a paper-based survey logic diagram is an additional contribution of this work. |
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Lukas Eisenring, OpenCHI.org: Understanding and Encouraging Open Practices in HCI Research, University of Zurich, Faculty of Business, Economics and Informatics, 2019. (Master's Thesis)
Open Science got an vital discussion topic in the research community. But statistics about the actual openness are a rare commodity nowadays. A taxonomy for categorizing research materials of CHI publications establishes a basis. On top of it, a survey was conducted about the research materials availability of the CHI 2019 publications. This survey answers questions about the public availability of the materials, the location to find public materials and the reasons why authors are not able or willing to share all of their research materials.
The platform OpenCHI.org provides a central database for pointers to publicly available materials of CHI publications. Everyone can contribute to and use the entries of the platform. It is designed as a crowdsourced platform and contains a set of incentive mechanisms for contributors. |
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Matthias Felix, Social Newsroom: Understanding News Reading in a Social Media Context, University of Zurich, Faculty of Business, Economics and Informatics, 2019. (Master's Thesis)
News consumption behavior has evolved significantly in the last decades, and while traditional news channels like TV stations and newspapers continue to play an important role, new platforms like social media have revolutionized the way people consume and share news. Social media give people more control over the content they consume, but at the same time introduce new challenges for individuals, like dealing with information overload. This can lead to people sharing news articles without reading them. This thesis presents the state of the research in social media news consumption and introduces Newsroom, a research project that aims at understanding better how individuals consume news in a social media context and how they are influenced by various factors, like seeing which friends have reacted to (e.g., liked or shared) a news post. Newsroom provides a technical infrastructure that
includes a mobile app which serves as a social news reader and a web dashboard that allows for customization of the app design and content, providing a rich set of options for field study design. The hope is that this infrastructure will contribute to a deeper understanding of how people consume and react to news on social media platforms, and will ultimately
help create better platforms and content with relevant and high-quality information. |
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Justin Sosnoski, AnnoTransformer: Replicating the human digital interpretation of paper annotations, University of Zurich, Faculty of Business, Economics and Informatics, 2019. (Master's Thesis)
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Florian Fischer, Chatchavan Wacharamanotham, Andrea Horn, Indivi: Personalizing feedback for study participants at scale, In: The 6th biennial conference of Society for Ambulatory Assessment (SAA) 2019. 2019. (Conference Presentation)
Ambulatory assessment often includes a significant burden to the participant, particularly if it includes self-reports. One way of compensating this effort and allow the study participant to take part in the interpretational discourse, is to provide personalized feedback of own data. With increasingly large number of study participants, manually personalizing feedback becomes infeasible. In this poster, we present “Indivi”, an open-source web application that aids researchers to personalize feedback at scale. Indivi is an interdisciplinary collaboration between experts in ambulatory assessment and HumanComputer Interaction. We started with Contextual Inquiry interviews with ambulatory assessment experts, resulting in work models showing (1) an iterative process of analyzing and formulating personalized feedback, (2) a taxonomy of variables and the associated method to visualize and contextualize the feedback. Based on these findings, we iteratively designed and tested the Indivi tool. To use Indivi, the researchers import a comma-separated file of study data. Indivi supports data from many types of study designs, including longitudinal data and dyadic data, within- and between-subjects. Then, they specify sets of variables. For each of these sets, in the second step, Indivi automatically choose an appropriate chart type and classifies participants in three categories depending on their individual values. The researchers assign textual explanation individually for the high, medium, and low values. These are used to personalize the feedback.
We believe that Indivi will provide researchers within an ambulatory assessment framework a scalable way to use personalized feedback to foster the participatory moment in their studies and motivate study participants. |
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Alexander Eiselmayer, Chatchavan Wacharamanotham, Michel Beaudouin-Lafon, Wendy E Mackay, Touchstone2 An Interactive Environment for Exploring Trade-offs in HCI Experiment Design, In: In CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems Proceedings (CHI 2019), ACM Press, New York, New York, USA, 2019-06-04. (Conference or Workshop Paper published in Proceedings)
Touchstone2 offers a direct-manipulation interface for generating and examining trade-offs in experiment designs. Based on interviews with experienced researchers, we developed an interactive environment for manipulating experiment design parameters, revealing patterns in trial tables, and estimating and comparing statistical power. We also developed TSL, a declarative language that precisely represents experiment designs. In two studies, experienced HCI researchers successfully used Touchstone2 to evaluate design trade-offs and calculate how many participants are required for particular effect sizes. We discuss Touchstone2’s benefits and limitations, as well as directions for future research. |
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Julian Iff, Timestone: A user interface for navigating the history of experimental designs, University of Zurich, Faculty of Business, Economics and Informatics, 2019. (Master's Thesis)
When conducting an experiment in Human-Computer Interaction a researcher frequently needs to make informed decisions regarding their design. They need to weight the cost of adding more participants and be aware of the trade-offs that emerge. To support the decision-making process especially for novice users this thesis presents the timestone history extension for Touchstone2. With this extension a user can now revisit experiments and annotate important decisions, compare multiple designs in one go and get support from a recommendation prototype on what could be considered next. For a developer, Touchstone2 is now easily extendible through a component-based project structure and researchers can compare multiple design histories on one screen to see how the different experimental design was created. The structure of the thesis first explains the refactoring. In the first chapter, it is described with a focus on project structure, application structure, and implemented
modules. Then three interaction logging studies are described with their goals, participants, methodology tasks and results. With the help of this data and the observed interactions, a history module was implemented and further explained. With the recommendation Module chapter, this thesis ends the implementation details. The following conclusion and future work put the thesis into a broader context. |
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Sebastian Pinegger, Touchstone2 Extended: Visual interface for Complex Experiment Designs, University of Zurich, Faculty of Business, Economics and Informatics, 2019. (Master's Thesis)
With the introduction of Touchstone2, the research community was introduced to a new tool which provides a direct-manipulation interface for experimental designs. It provides researchers with within-participant experimental designs. This thesis extends the experimental designs canvas with between-subject groups experimental designs with the combination of sessions and unequal levels. Touchstone2:Extended gives the user the opportunity to design complex experimental designs that are transformed into the TSL standard. The new implementation of the design canvas is based on four iterations of prototypes ranging from pen-and-paper prototypes to animated user interactions in videos. The thesis highlights the implementation and sets the foundation for future extensions of the experimental design canvas. |
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