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

While outdoor sport activities keep gaining popularity as part of a global trend to maintain a healthier lifestyle, current technology offers limited support for activity-specific needs. Therefore, a greater understanding of information sharing behaviours is necessary in order to build comprehensive, socially-embedded sports applications. To this purpose, we interviewed 46 practitioners in three outdoor sports: trail running, climbing, and skiing. Our qualitative study investigates how participants share information in the context of outdoor sports and how current technology supports this practice. Through thematic analysis, we derived five themes that describe the current information sharing practices: nature, risk and planning, content selection, audience selection, and privacy. Based on these themes, we present five recommendations for design that can inform, inspire and refine future sharing technologies for outdoor sport.

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The rapid replacement cycle of consumer electronics, leading to wasteful use of scarce resources and a growing amount of electronic waste, poses a major threat to a sustainable future. Technological advancements of research, such as in Human-Computer Interaction, contribute to this development and therefore have a responsibility to combat those problems. Theoretical research in Sustainable HCI has developed a variety of design principles and frameworks that can be used to address issues of obsolescence; however, they rarely leave the realm of theory and make their way into design practice. This phenomenon is well-known in the general field of HCI, often referred to as the theory-practice gap. In this thesis, we explore ways to bridge the theory-practice gap and address the obsolescence of consumer electronics by applying Sustainable HCI theory to product design practice. To lay the foundation of our research and understand people’s motivation for replacing products, we conducted a survey and follow-up interviews about the most important factors in people’s decision-making process when purchasing consumer electronics. Based on the insights, we took one of the most established frameworks from Sustainable HCI, the Attachment Framework, and asked product designers to include it into their design process. The Attachment Framework offers a set of principles that lead to a deeper bond between an object and its owner, preventing premature disposal and is a particularly powerful tool due to its emotional appeal. Through a product design activity with two groups of seven designers, one of which was given the Attachment Framework, we conducted a comparative study to gauge the impact of the Sustainable HCI design principles on the product design process and its outcome. The mixed results led us to formulate a set of challenges for the application of theoretical frameworks to design practice, which we sought to investigate on further by implementing two different approaches: A web tool to organize the results of background research called StickyDesignSpace, and a brainstorming app called InspiredDesign. Our final evaluation yields insights into ways how Sustainable HCI design knowledge can be successfully transferred to practitioners outside of the realm of research.

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While researchers have long investigated end-user program- ming using a trigger-action (if-then) model, the website IFTTT is among the first instances of this paradigm being used on a large scale. To understand what IFTTT users are creating, we scraped the 224,590 programs shared pub- licly on IFTTT as of September 2015 and are releasing this dataset to spur future research. We characterize aspects of these programs and the IFTTT ecosystem over time. We find a large number of users are crafting a diverse set of end- user programs—over 100,000 different users have shared pro- grams. These programs represent a very broad array of con- nections that appear to fill gaps in functionality, yet users of- ten duplicate others’ programs.

With the growing adoption of smart home technologies, inhabitants are faced with the challenge of making sense of the data that their homes can collect to configure automated behaviors that benefit their routines. Current commercial smart home interfaces usually provide information on individual devices instead of a more comprehensive overview of a home’s behavior. To reduce the complexity of smart home data and integrate it better into inhabitants’ lives, we turned to the familiar metaphor of a calendar and developed our smart home interface Casalendar. In order to investigate the concept and evaluate our goals to facilitate the understanding of smart home data, we created a prototype that we installed in two commercial smart homes for a month. The results we present in this paper are based on our analysis of user data from questionnaires, semi-structured interviews, participant-driven audio and screenshot feedback as well as logged interactions with our system. Our findings exposed advantages and disadvantages of this metaphor, emerging usage patterns, privacy concerns and challenges for information visualization. We further report on implications for design and open challenges we revealed through this work.

Sustainable HCI can still be considered a relatively young field; yet, it has seen a variety of recent contributions investigating previous approaches and raising questions on how to go forward. As such, the field would greatly benefit from an effort to summarize existing solutions, avoiding reinventing the wheel but also identifying blank spots of missing research. Design patterns offer such an approach. Established in the domain of architecture, successfully utilized to date in software engineering, and having been applied to a variety of areas in HCI, design patterns have a rich history from which the SHCI community can learn and use it to its advantage. We examine previous approaches of design patterns and based on those insights lay out a set of challenges and opportunities for their application to SHCI. As our analysis highlights, patterns can be geared towards recording knowledge or as a tool for outward communication, and given the state of the field, we believe the first objective is the more feasible and more promising starting point.

Textile interfaces can be ubiquitously integrated into the fabrics that already surround us. So far, however, existing interfaces transfer concepts, such as buttons and sliders,to the textile domain without leveraging the affordances and qualities of fabric. This paper presents Grabrics, a two-dimensional textile sensor that is manipulated by grabbing a fold and moving it between your fingers. Grabrics textile nature allows it to be integrated invisibly into everyday clothing or into textile objects, like a living room sofa. We describe the construction and the fold-based interaction technique of Grabrics sensor. A preliminary user study shows that Grabrics can be folded and manipulated from any arbitrary position, and it can detect 2D stroke gestures reliably.

This thesis focuses on the aspect of collaboration between inhabitants and their smart homes. A context aware system in the domestic space, depending on the sophistication of the system, has limitations which can be overcome by involving users where the system falls short. Previous work has not adequately addressed the aspect of looking into people's perceptions regarding a system which combines context-awareness with user input through smart watches. By installing the prototype system "Auteamate" in multiple households, insights into how inhabitants perceive collaboration with each other and the smart home system could be established. Complementing information available to the system with inputs from users "using humans as sensors" enables the system to overcome its limitations concerning the ability to infer meaningful conclusions and providing users with appropriate support. Results from this thesis can inform the development of future context aware systems in the domestic space to maximize benefits for inhabitants.

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Given that any smart home will ultimately be inhabited by end users, involving them into the planning phase is indispensable to spread the understanding and acceptance of intelligent solutions. However, from users' perspective understanding the complex landscape comprises navigating through the quantity of available solutions, as well as identifying needed hardware. Moreover, suppliers often concentrate on technologies, and not on people. Such a non-user-centric, but technology focused organisation does not support users in achieving their automation goals. Thus, we propose a more user-centric approach to build a cognitive bridge between goals and technologies. Additionally, given that users often experience difficulties in imagining future effects of domestic technologies, we are introducing a 3D visualisation integrating the goal-focused approach. We implemented the two approaches in one prototype and performed an evaluation study. The results for the goal-based approach were very positive whereas the 3D visualisation has to be further refined to exploit its opportunities. In particular, each user should be provided with an exact representation of his or her home. This extension would enhance users more in putting themselves into the context of their domestic space.

Touch screens allow users to interact with virtual objects directly below their fingertips. The proximity of input and output blurs the line between the physical and the virtual world, allowing the interactions to feel natural. However, direct finger input has several limitations. Compared to the tip of a graphics stylus, a fingertip is bigger and softer, making it more likely to occlude the screen and generate ambiguous touch signals. Furthermore, touch screens register any contact, making it more likely that they will respond to unintentional input, such as pressing a button when a finger just brushes pass it. These two problems exemplify issues in two types of input accuracy: space accuracy (“where it is being touched”) and state accuracy (“whether it is being touched”). In this thesis, we investigate space and state accuracy in four usage scenarios. First, we focused on users with hand tremors, whose involuntary finger oscillation causes them to miss targets and creates spurious touches and releases. To improve touch screen accessibility, we investigated how tremors influence touch input. Then, we designed and evaluated an alternative interaction technique that leverages the tremor movement characteristics for more accurate input. Second, we addressed a state accuracy problem in indirect multi-touch systems, in which a horizontal multi-touch screen is used to control cursors on a vertical display for ergonomic usage. We operationalized measures for state slips and compared four techniques for controlling the state of cursors. Third, we augmented touch screens with near-surface interaction by sensing fingers hovering in a thin layer above the screen surface. We determined appropriate layer thickness to minimize the likelihood that the fingers will slip out of the layer. Finally, we tackled the problem where touch contacts drift away from buttons when users employ touch screens without looking at them. Here, we assessed how magnetic forces might substitute for vision by guiding the fingertips towards the button in these scenarios. While the findings contribute to the body of scientific knowledge in each specific usage scenario, the insights derived from all four scenarios in combination suggest strategies for designing touch interaction techniques to maximize space and state accuracy.

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