Contributions published at People and Computing Lab (Elaine May Huang)

Quality control in the pharmaceutical industry serves the purpose that only high-quality and safe drugs reach the market. This highly complex process needs to be monitored and planned carefully. Therefore, Meocon GmbH, a management consulting boutique for the pharmaceutical industry created the Q_alizer, an intelligent tool that analyses and visualizes the sample flow processes in quality control organizations and helps to uncover weaknesses. Since Q_alizer is in its early stages, no requirements engineering had taken place so far to check if all of the users’ needs are fulfilled. Therefore, this thesis explores Q_alizer users’ needs and Meocon’s vision of the further development of the tool. A new prototype with new functionalities for KPI insights, planning, distributing and forecasting and a new design has been developed in Figma focusing on the outcomings of the requirements engineering. In evaluation, users were very impressed by the new features and new design but also made suggestions for further improvement.

The increased popularity of UX design practices in the industry led to the creation of more usable, useful, and enjoyable digital products and services. Nonetheless, the scope of the UX efforts generally concerns a single product or project under development. In this workshop, we call for the shift beyond a single product paradigm towards a more ecosystemic approach in UX design to create long-lasting, reusable, and transferable UX artifacts. Gathering a group of scholars who are interested in UX processes at work, and UX practitioners, leaders, and managers, we aim to synthesize the current state of the discussion to create a UX research agenda for designing integrated digital work environments, unpacking development, users, and change perspectives to aid knowledge transfer across projects and overtime.

Many non-profit resource sharing organizations and collectives (e.g., libraries of things) and local peer-to-peer exchange initiatives leverage underutilized personal resources, such as household tools, to optimize their use. These local sharing initiatives and arrangements often suffer from challenges of continued participation, visibility of members’ interactions as well as interpersonal trust among the membership, which prevent their sustainable development. In prior work, we engaged in a field study of Pumpipumpe, a local resource sharing community in Switzerland to identify members’ needs and requirements to support sharing practices among neighbors. Following insights from this study, we conducted a generative participatory workshop with six community members and design and sustainability experts to approach these emergent challenges. We present the design artifacts that we have developed for the co-creation workshop as well as three design alternatives that our participants conceptualized to address issues of visibility of social interactions and trust among neighbors.

The field of Human-Computer Interaction has recently taken a growing interest in research with disadvantaged, marginalized communities, and participants, such as motor-impaired users, homeless adults, or people who struggle with mental health. These collaborations turned out to be very fruitful, because they enable the creation of designs such as automatically generated ability-based interfaces, communication and social support for visually impaired as well as homeless people. Previous scholarship has shown that there is a greater need to address the issues of marginalized and disadvantaged groups and that the incorporation of Human-Computer Interaction promises innovative solutions that significantly improve the lives of these groups. In cooperation with the Swiss Centre of Competence against Forced Marriage, this thesis explores the issue of forced marriage in Switzerland and the restrictions and challenges it imposes on creating a technical solution. The thesis proposes an app, designed through the findings of several interviews with affected, to help people affected by forced marriages in Switzerland, and tests and discusses its feasibility of use.

Emerging studies of local cooperatives, their sharing practices, and the use of platforms for cooperation call for specific designs and design guidelines to support the endurance and growth of a community-oriented collaborative economy. These efforts also indicate that design has the potential to shape cooperative engagements. However, to-date, only a few design resources are tailored for exploring and further developing design insights from empirical and conceptual research on sharing and cooperativism. To bridge this gap, we report on an international workshop that included a diverse group of scholars, designers, and activists. During the workshop, we aimed to unpack the role of design regarding sharing and cooperativism. Through the synthesis of workshop outcomes, we present new insights pointing towards the development of an ecosystemic approach in design for cooperativism. We call on designers to (1) proactively adopt design goals that focus on ecosystemic design and tools; (2) be inclusive, equitable, and justice-oriented to ensure solidarity and collectivism; and (3) rethink terms such as currency and data while designing for cooperativism in their projects. In this chapter, we conceptualise and discuss the key ideas from the workshop highlighting potential implications for design research and practice.

Recent work on sharing and cooperativism has helped widen our understanding of the emerging systems for exchanges, interactions, and relationships beyond mainstream economic models, in particular through studying local cooperatives and their sharing practices across various domains. These efforts also indicate that design has the potential to shape our engagements with the global political economy. However, so far, there are few design resources tailored for exploring and further developing design insights from empirical and conceptual research on sharing and cooperativism. Therefore, we invite the community to discuss the role of design in relation to economies of sharing and cooperativism. In this workshop, we will gather a diverse group of scholars, designers, and activists to think together how designs for sustainable economies can be created and circulated across cooperatives and platforms, with the aim to springboard social and economic aspects of sharing cultures.

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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.

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.

With the adoption of the 2030 Agenda and its associated 17 Sustainable Development Goals in 2015, everyone is responsible for putting the SDGs into practice, which includes the scientific community as well. This thesis presents a systematic literature review of how the SDGs have already been addressed implicitly in sustainable HCI. Based on a body of research papers, I determine the key SDGs contributing to sustainable development within SHCI and identify the implications these findings have for future work in order to create viable solutions.

After decades of technological development, the way people interact with paper and digital technologies has remained unchanged: physical and digital are mostly used in a mutually exclusive fashion. According to studies conducted in the early 2000’s by Abigail J. Sellen and Richard H. R. Harper, the causes of this phenomenon are manifold. One of the main factors identified is the incapability of technologies to suggest affordances of a piece of paper such as folding, manipulating and being spatially flexible - making a crossover or the replacement of paper unthinkable. This paper updates the affordances indicated by Sellen et Harper to 2020’s technological state of the art. It adds to the picture the emerging technology augmented reality (AR), which intrinsically has great potential in bridging physical and digital interactions. This paper investigates how AR might be designed to address the deficiencies identified by Sellen and individuates different scenarios of paper-AR combined interactions. To get a first impression of how paper interactions might look in a future where AR is omnipresent and to gather a deeper understanding of general design challenges, a prototype of one of the scenarios has been developed. Also, a reduced qualitative testing has been carried out to evaluate the acceptance of a potential user base.

Research in Human-Computer Interaction still seems to generally follow a cisnormative and binary logic. To address this problematic aspect with this thesis, the traditional version of the GenderMag usability evaluation method was extended with a transgender and a non-binary persona. In a pilot study, these personas and a cisgender persona were used for a GenderMag walkthrough and the implications of the personas’ gender on the outcome of the walkthrough and the stereotypical thinking of the evaluators were investigated. The results indicate that the gender of a persona may affect the number of identified issues and the stereotyping of the personas.

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Online social networks have made sharing personal experiences with others – mostly in the form of photos and comments – a common activity. The convergence of social, mobile, cloud and wearable computing has expanded the scope of user-generated and shared content on the net from personal media to individual preferences to physiological details (e.g., in the form of daily workouts) to information about real-world possessions (e.g., apartments, cars). Once everyday things become increasingly networked (i.e., the Internet of Things), future online services and connected devices will only expand the set of “things” to share. Given that a new generation of sharing services is about to emerge, it is of crucial importance to provide service designers with the right insights to adequately support novel sharing practices. This work explores these practices within two emergent sharing domains: (1) personal activity tracking and (2) “sharing economy” services. The goal of this dissertation is to understand current practices of sharing personal digital and physical possessions, and to uncover corresponding end-user needs and concerns across novel sharing practices, in order to map the design space to support emergent and future sharing needs. We address this goal by adopting two research strategies, one using a bottom-up approach, the other following a top-down approach. In the bottom-up approach, we examine in-depth novel sharing practices within two emergent sharing domains through a set of empirical qualitative studies. We offer a rich and descriptive account of peoples’ sharing routines and characterize the specific role of interactive technologies that support or inhibit sharing in those domains. We then design, develop, and deploy several technology prototypes that afford digital and physical sharing with the view to informing the design of future sharing services and tools within two domains, personal activity tracking and sharing economy services. In the top-down approach, drawing on scholarship in human-computer interaction (HCI) and interaction design, we systematically examine prior work on current technology-mediated sharing practices and identify a set of commonalities and differences among sharing digital and physical artifacts. Based upon these findings, we further argue that many challenges and issues that are present in digital online sharing are also highly relevant for the physical sharing in the context of the sharing economy, especially when the shared physical objects have digital representations and are mediated by an online platform. To account for these particularities, we develop and field-test an action-driven toolkit for design practitioners to both support the creation of future sharing economy platforms and services, as well as to improve the user experience of existing services. This dissertation should be of particular interest to HCI and interaction design researchers who are critically exploring technology-mediated sharing practices through fieldwork studies, as well to design practitioners who are building and evaluating sharing economy services.

This master’s thesis explores various methods for self-reporting stress by assessing factors that influence the user experience. It proposes how self-reporting of stress should be gathered to yield a positive experience for the user. Previous work on self-reporting has not focused on the user experience, neither did it adequately evaluate what users perceive as a comfortable, non-intrusive and accurate method to collect self-reporting of stress. Results from this thesis can be used as a foundation for future research on combining self-reporting with physiological measures for assessing stress and providing immediate intervention.

A persisting problem in physiotherapy is that patients do not sufficiently adhere to their home-exercise program, which negatively impacts the therapy outcome. To address this problem in this thesis, challenges and practices of physiotherapy patients are investigated. Furthermore, the potential of a digital physiotherapy coach (Physio-Coach) and the two most common exercise instruction methods in addressing those challenges are assessed. A laboratory study with 15 physiotherapy patients was conducted. The study included qualitative interviews and supportive data elicited through a questionnaire. The results suggest that the Physio-Coach was successful in addressing several of the challenges mentioned by the participants. However, it was poorly compatible with the participants' common practices through its limited flexibility and portability. The paper- and video-based instruction methods were limited in their guidance capabilities but seemed a better choice for patients with high motivation and simple exercises. It is assumed that the Physio-Coach could prove useful for a more specific user-group which need to perform complex exercises over a long period of time.

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If social, economic and environmental sustainability are linked, then support for the increasing number of non-profit groups and member-owned organizations offering what Trebor Scholz has called “platform cooperativism” has never been more important. Together, these organizations not only tackle issues their members identify in the world of work, but also provide network-driven collections of shared things (e.g., books, tools) and resources (e.g., woodworking spaces, fab labs) that benefit local communities, potentially changing, not just use of resources at community level, but socio-economic structures on the ground (e.g., 15). In contrast to for-profit services often associated with the sharing economy (e.g., Uber, Airbnb), platform co-ops attempt to advocate ecological, economic and social sustainability, with the goal to promoting a fairer distribution of goods and labor, ultimately creating a stronger sense of community. While some HCI sub-communities (e.g., CSCW) have started to explore this emergent phenomenon, especially leveraging ethnographic research methods, researchers have called for more diverse HCI approaches to address the growing scope of challenges within platform co-ops, member-driven exchange systems, and cooperativism more broadly. This SIG aims to bring together researchers from different HCI sub-communities to identify future research directions in HCI around cooperativism and platforms.