HCI Research Group Seminars Archive

 

Summer Term 2008

Date Speaker Title
(Links to abstract)
23 April
(Wednesday)
Andrew Adams
School of Systems Engineering
University of Reading
HCI Challenges in Security
1 May DVD Relative Confusion
8 May William Newman
visiting professor, UCLIC
Temporal structures in conversation, and how computer usage interferes
15 May Mark Blythe Tenori On HCI
22 May Paul Vickers
University of Northumbria
Perception vs Intention: International & Cultural Influences on Semiotic Transformations Between [The Two Cultures] Squared
29 May Victor M. Gonzalez
Manchester Business School
Personal Task-Management: Key Challenges For Designing Interactive Support Tools
5 June Daniel Kudenko
Department of Computer Science
(Postponed)Interactive Drama
12 June Gilbert Cockton
University of Sunderland
Grounding Design Purpose: Properties, Qualities or Worth?
19 June Thomas Green Ten years of cognitive dimensions
16 July
(09.00)
Chris Newell 'Liveness' in Computer Speech

Abstracts

23 April
Andrew Adams: HCI Challenges in Security

Dr Adams is involved in a number of "security" research projects funded by various bodies. His involvement is in the social and legal implications of the technology being developed, and how it might be deployed and used. As part of this work, the challenges of HCI for the field of security, are becoming evident. In this talk he presents some of the findings of his analysis of security technology research.

As with computer systems of earlier generations, the interface elements of security technology are often the most overlooked. Just as the early nuclear power plants had impossible interfaces, so too do the CCTV control rooms that mushroomed in the 80s and 90s. People are part of the system, in the case of security they are the operators and the subjects, good and bad, of the system. People are much trickier than machines, as HCI practitioners well know. Security technology research must begin to spend significantly more efforts on the interfaces of their systems to avoid being expensive white elephants that in the end do more harm than good in security terms.

1 May
Relative Confusion

This is a DVD of a short play, produced by the University of Dundee. It follows the story of three older siblings who are attempting to move into the modern age with the use of digital television. It traces the problems that they have - some of which may be exaggerated by age-related effects, but some of which may be all to familiar to us all.

There will be time for some discussion of the implications of the characters' experiences.

8th May
William Newman: Temporal structures in conversation, and how computer usage interferes

Computers are often used by participants in conversations.  For example, doctors use computers during consultations to access patients' records, and attendees at meetings may use their laptops to take notes.  I will describe observational studies of these and other settings, which have exposed temporal structures in conversation that can be disrupted when computers are used, in ways that rarely occur when pen and paper are used instead.  I will suggest that there are important performance requirements to consider when designing any software that could be used in conversational settings.

15 May
Mark Blythe: Tenori-On HCI

The Tenori On is a new musical instrument by Japanese artist / designer Toshio Iwai. It is part sequencer and part sampler and the interface is made up of a grid of lights which the user activates to make loops of sound. It is rather spiffing and I thought anyone interested in interaction design might like to play with it. I'll bring one to the session and perhaps we will be able to create a group composition. We might also have a clever and insightful discussion about aesthetics, enjoyment and"post-usability" HCI.

In short, I've got a new gadget and I'll let you have a go. There's a link to a youtube demo by Toshio Iwai here
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GE-lJzKIzDE

(I am not as good at using it as he is)

22 May
Paul Vickers: Perception vs Intention: International & Cultural Influences on Semiotic Transformations Between [The Two Cultures] Squared

In a collaborative interdisciplinary project I am working with colleagues from the School of Creative Media at RMIT University (Melbourne, Australia) to study the effects of cultural differences on the relationship between perceived and intended meanings of narrative content of visual and auditory artefacts created by students in the UK and Australia. Students on Northumbria's Multimedia Computing and Multimedia & Digital Entertainment programmes take the Level 5 module Multimedia Time-based Assets. For part of their assessment these students are required to produce non-speech auditory narratives which are informed by research in the Auditory Display area. In this project students have produced an auditory ident which is then interpreted by students on RMIT's Digital Photography course who are required to produce a photographic narrative which they feel captures the essential meaning of the auditory ident. In a reciprocal task, RMIT students also produce a photographic ident which is transformed by Northumbria students into a non-speech auditory narrative. A major feature of this project is to explore the differences between the artefacts' intended and perceived meanings and what effects, if any, the role of culture (both national and discipline-based) played in this process.

29 May
Victor M. Gonzalez: Key Challenges For Designing Interactive Support Tools

Many recent studies provide evidence of the challenges experienced by knowledge workers while multi-tasking among several projects and initiatives. Work is often interrupted, and this commonly results in people leaving activities pending until they have the time, information, resources or energy to reassume them. Among the different types of knowledge workers, those working directly with Information Technology (IT) or offering IT services - software developers, support engineers, systems administrators or database managers -, experience particularly challenging scenarios of multi-tasking given the varied, crisis-driven and reactive nature of their work. Previous recommendations and technological solutions to ameliorate these challenges give limited attention to individual's preferences and to understanding how and what tools and strategies could be better to benefit IT service workers as individuals. Based on the analysis of characteristics of IT service work and a consolidation of findings regarding personal activity management processes, this talk will present the design of a software tool to support those processes and discuss preliminary findings of its usage by four IT service workers over a period of six weeks. We found that the tool has been used for short periods, but it is quite effective for enhancing the organization and constant revision of activity, as well as provides adequate level of flexibility to support the varied nature of IT-service work.

Brief bio:
Dr. Victor M. Gonzalez is a Lecturer in Human-Computer Interaction and member of the Information Systems and Interactive Systems Group at the University of Manchester. He studies the psychological and sociological implications of information technologies; focusing on analyzing the 'praxis' of work, the personal and social spheres of human activity and on designing and evaluating information technologies. Dr. Gonzalez is a Senior Research Fellow of CRITO (Centre for Research on Information Technology and Organizations) at the University of California at Irvine, USA. He received a Ph.D. and Master degrees in Information and Computer Science from the University of California at Irvine and a Master degree in Telecommunications and Information Systems from the University of Essex, United Kingdom.

12 June
Gilbert Cockton: Grounding Design Purpose: Properties, Qualities or Worth?

Approaches to Interaction Design tend to focus on the properties of the artefact or the qualities of the interaction, with an empirical bias in HCI from the 1980s suppressing more artefact-centred approaches from computer science.  Such a shift from artefact to use happened at least 25 years earlier within product design, which has subsequently moved on to consider the meaning of products, the design of product(-service) systems and the value created by design.

In this talk I will briefly review the history of product design in the twentieth century and consider whether Interaction Design needs to catch up with contemporary design thinking.  To some extent, the recent focus on user experience has brought approaches from 1980s design into HCI (especially the philosophies of the Memphis Group), but there has been less focus firstly on product ecologies and secondly on design as the creation of value.  I will illustrate what both can mean in design, and consider whether and how we could 'catch up' with product-service system design and focus on achieved value rather than the artefact or usage as the generic purpose of design.
My argument will be that we need to focus on all three, that is, the artefact, usage and value, but within an integrating framework around the idea of worth as the achieved balance between the costs and (valuable) benefits of ownership and usage.  I will argue that a focus on value alone is incompatible with the nature of designing, and that the concept of value is inadequate for understanding the human choices that make some designs successful and others failures.  While this is all fine in theory, there is a much more important question of what this means for practice.  I will briefly answer this by introducing six meta-principles for designing and a framework of novel worth-centred approaches to Interaction Design.

Gilbert Cockton has been Research Chair in HCI at the University of Sunderland since 1997, where he has directed a combination of research programmes on design and evaluation methods and  extreme accessibility alongside large regional and national support projects for the digital sector.  From Autumn 2005 to the end of 2007, his research into value- and worth-centred development was funded by a NESTA fellowship and a visiting researcher post at Microsoft Research Cambridge.   Gilbert has been an active contributor to HCI activities through Interaction (formerly the BCS British HCI Group, former group chair), ACM SIGCHI (co-chairing CHI 2003) and IFIP (former vice-chair of TC13).

19th June
T R G Green: Ten years of cognitive dimensions

The Cognitive Dimensions framework (mainly but not exclusively created by me) has been around for ages, quite long enough to comment on how well it worked out - an evaluation of an information structure designed for evaluating information structures. So, first a quick sketch of the story so far for those who missed earlier episodes, in which I shall emphasise that it can be applied to all kinds of information structures (yes, including Hampton Court Maze) - it's not limited to HCI. Then I shall offer my assessment of how far it met its original aims: easy-to-learn broad-brush evaluation offering a unified vocabulary for evaluation. And to end with, a few thoughts on aspects that have yet to be properly explored, such as how notations can collaborate, one being used for some parts of a process and another being used for other parts; and how the development of a notation over time can be affected by 'notational economics'.


Abstracts for postponed seminars

1 May (Postponed - to be re-arranged)
Patrick Olivier: Culture Technologies

Links:

I'll be talking about the research I've been involved in since moving from York to Newcastle University just over 3 years ago. In conventional terms this might be described as pervasive interaction design, that is, interaction in situated and mobile settings (e.g. Ambient Kitchen, Tabletop Interfaces, Digital Jewellery). More interestingly though I am developing a strand of interdisciplinary research that I call 'Cultural Technologies' which seeks to explore richness of human experience and personal relations, and use this understanding to develop technology that make people's lives more meaningful. Sounds fluffy (I know), but it is becoming increasingly clear that technologists need to look beyond the confines of their own disciplines if they are to address the problem of creating technology that enhances, rather than diminishes, our experience of the world. Cultural Technologies seek to enable this by facilitating research collaborations between computing scientists, electronic engineers, and researchers in the arts, humanities and social sciences. Interdisciplinary approaches are already apparent in some areas of computing science research, such as human-computer interaction and systems design, where techniques from anthropology and sociology have helped computer scientists address some of the richness of real-world settings. Cultural Technologies engages architects, musicians, artists, film makers and social scientists in the exploration of the nature of people's encounters with technology, in particular, in relation the everyday scenarios envisaged by proponents of pervasive computing -- a future in which technology is integrated into the very fabric of the world around us. I'll be sticking around for the afternoon too...


Autumn Term 2008

Date Speaker Title
(Links to abstract)
16 October Mark Blythe Interaction Design and the Critics: What to Make of the Weegie
23 October André Pimenta Freire
University of York
A survey on the accessibility awareness of people involved in web development projects in Brazil
30 October Dave Swallow Who supports the support workers? E-learning for support workers of students with disabilities
6 November Andrew Monk Combining the social and the individual: fun, conversation and social networks
13 November Janet Finlay
Leeds Metropolitan University
Representations of Practice
20 November Steve Whittaker
University of Sheffield
The Past Present and Future of Digital Memories
27 November Helen Petrie Designing Chinese language websites: considerations of colour and navigation Postponed due to illness
4 December Ian McClelland
University of York
User Experience design - reflections on industrial practice Postponed due to bad weather
11 December Daniel Kudenko
Department of Computer Science
Interactive Drama
18 December Helen Petrie Internationalization of websites: navigation in English language and Chinese language sites

16 October
Mark Blythe

This paper describes the development and evaluation of “weegie” an audio-photography desk featuring sounds and images inspired by the Govan area of Glasgow. It was intended to be an interactive artwork that would challenge negative preconceptions about the area. The paper describes two techniques used to consider the extent to which the piece achieved these aims. The first technique is the “personal meaning map” and taken from museum studies. The second is cultural critique drawn from the arts. Building on Gaver’s strategy of using cultural commentators for ‘polyphonic’ assessment it considers the extent to which perspectives drawn from the humanities and the arts can be useful in evaluating design. It argues that a more rigorous understanding of critical theory is necessary to the development of interaction design criticism.

23 October
André Pimenta Freire: A survey on the accessibility awareness of people involved in web development projects in Brazil

Accessibility has become a very important issue to promote inclusion in the Information Society, and people involved in Web development projects have a very important role to contribute with the development of a more inclusive Web. In this talk, I will present an investigation on the accessibility awareness of people involved in Web development in Brazil. We have conducted the research by means of an exploratory survey with a Web based questionnaire and a sample with subjects from academy, industry and government. The study had 613 valid answers and involved representatives from all of the 27 states of Brazil. The results show that accessibility is still far from being actually considered in Web development projects in Brazil, as only 19.9% of the participants have stated that accessibility is considered in their projects. The lack of education on accessibility, as well as the poor spread of the Brazilian accessibility law are important issues to be dealt with to boost a stronger accessibility awareness among people involved in Web development.

The presentation should be mostly about the results previously presented at the W4A'08 conference: http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1368044.1368064

Speaker: André Pimenta Freire

André is a new research student, working with Helen. In this seminar he will be reporting work that he carried out as part of his master's research.

30 October
Dave Swallow: Who supports the support workers? E-learning for support workers of students with disabilities

This paper discusses the results of an investigation regarding the support of people with disabilities in educational settings. The results indicated a lack of standardization in training and gaps in the knowledge and attitudes of educational professionals regarding how to appropriately support people with disabilities in higher and further education. The paper discusses a pilot project for offering workplace training on skills and techniques for a group of educational professionals, support workers of people with disabilities, through an online course in a virtual learning environment.

6 November
Andrew Monk: Combining the social and the individual: fun, conversation and social networks

An alternative sub-title for this talk could have been "what I learned from Darren Reed". This was, that sociologists in general, and ethnomethodologists in particular, think about human behaviour at the level of the group while psychologist like myself think at the level of the individual. In this talk I will very briefly outline three areas where I think that these two approaches can be combined, i.e., where it is possible to say something specific about the interface between the social and the individual.

The first of these areas is Darren's work on conversational flow that can be thought of as using behaviour as an indicator of user experience (fun). This was further developed into a successful behavioural measure of fun in photo sharing by Siân Lindsey. The second area is Clark's theory of language use. Clark uses the concepts of common ground and joint action to provide what is essentially a cognitive model of conversation. Finally, I will consider the area of simulated societies by demonstrating some of my beginner's efforts with NetLogo.  My task here is demonstrate emergent social phenomena in the simulated social networks of older people. That is to compare the resilience of networks "grown" in different ways to the removal of individual nodes (death!)

13 November
Janet Finlay: Representations of Practice

To improve educational practice it is necessary be exposed to, to reflect on, and to incorporate the excellent practices of others. But transfer of practice is recognised as a complex process in higher education, in professional education and in other knowledge-transfer contexts. It is acknowledged that traditional dissemination mechanisms — such as workshops and publications — are only partially successful. It is therefore important to explore new, and more effective, ways to represent practice between practitioners in different contexts.

In this talk I will discuss two projects that aim to support transfer of practice in different ways.  The HCI Disciplinary Commons has been running throughout the 2008-09 academic year and brings together practitioners from across the UK who are teaching human-computer interaction in order to reflect in depth on their teaching practice. The Commons has been using the Portfolio as its primary representation mechanism although other representations have been explored. The Pattern Language Network is a JISC-funded initiative, which aims to support the sharing of practice on the use of Web 2.0 in learning through the harvesting and use of patterns. The talk will introduce the rationale and approach of each project and will discuss the representations explored and what they can contribute to enhancing transfer of practice.

20 November
Steve Whittaker: The Past Present and Future of Digital Memories

Recent technical developments have inspired an interest in 'digital memories': repositories for capturing our entire personal history of personal and work related information that will substitute for our fragile organic memories. I will first review the Digital Memories vision, briefly present various empirical studies that challenge that vision, moving on to suggest an alternative design approach to the topic that is informed by cognitive science, suggesting that instead of focusing on exhaustive capture we should be designing prosthetic memory devices that are (a) synergistic with our organic memories (b) have mechanisms for selecting and abstracting critical events from the memory record. I will illustrate the approach with reference to applications built within my research group.

Speaker: Steve Whittaker, Sheffield University

Steve Whittaker is Chair in Information Studies at Sheffield University. Previously he worked in industrial research at HP, Lotus/IBM and AT Bell Labs. His research interests are in the theory, design and evaluation of collaborative systems, multimedia retrieval, and personal information management. He was recently elected to the CHI Academy and is currently working on digital tools that help us remember and share our memories.

4 DecemberPostponed
Ian McClelland: User Experience design - reflections on industrial practice

Ian will briefly outline his background and his involvement in the development of interactive systems within Philips. As a main focus the talk will reflect on the shift from product usability to User Experience and the relationship of 'User Experience Design' (UXD) to business development. An initial framework for UXD that he is co-developing with (ex) Philips colleagues will also be discussed. Ian will also briefly outline his interest in working with CUHTec.

11 December
Daniel Kudenko: Interactive Drama

Interactive Drama research is concerned with the creation of virtual worlds where a player can experience and interact with non-player characters in a computer-generated story. The seminar presentation will be in three parts: (1) a brief history of story-telling within commercial computer games, (2) an overview of interactive drama research at York, and (3) a vision of where we plan to go from here.

18 December
Helen Petrie: Internationalization of websites: navigation in English language and Chinese language sites

Helen Petrie, Christopher Power and Wei Song

Within 20 years of its invention, the World Wide Web has become one of the dominant means of communication of information, commerce, education and entertainment throughout the world.  Although the Web is accessible from virtually anywhere in the world, the content of the Web is still predominantly in English.

However, this is beginning to change with the number of websites in Chinese increasing by 950% between 2006 and 2008. Therefore, creating websites for non-English readers is becoming an increasingly important topic.  A number of authors (Aykin, Quaet-Faslem and Milewski, 2006; Marcus and Gould, 2000) have developed guidelines and principles for the internationalization of websites. These authors mention the need to align text and graphics appropriately for languages that are written and read from right to left or vertically, but little is said about the effects of different writing arrangements on navigational styles in websites. 

Yet the placement of navigational elements in web pages is clearly vital for their effective and efficient use. Experimental studies have shown that native English readers perform best when information for problems is presented in a series of horizontal lines from top left of a page, but readers of languages not traditionally organized this way (e.g. Arabic, Japanese) perform better when information is presented vertically.  This leads us to hypothesise that the now “default” arrangement of navigation bars may not be optimal for speakers of languages which differ from the left-to-right/horizontal arrangement of English (and other European languages). Two studies conducted to investigate this hypothesis will be presented.


Spring Term 2009

Date Speaker Title
(Links to abstract)
22 January
29 January Ian McClelland
University of York
User Experience design - reflections on industrial practice
Slides (PDF)
5 February Helen Petrie Measuring users' emotional reactions to websites
12 February Andrew Monk Futurology: predicting trends in assistive technology (AT) and service development
19 February    
26 February Mark Blythe Critical Methods and User Generated Content: the iPhone on YouTube
5 March    
12 March Paul Cairns YouTube by numbers
19 March Bernd Ploderer
University of Melbourne
Social Network Sites and the Passion of Bodybuilding


Abstracts

29 January
Ian McClelland: User Experience design - reflections on industrial practice

Ian will briefly outline his background and his involvement in the development of interactive systems within Philips. As a main focus the talk will reflect on the shift from product usability to User Experience and the relationship of 'User Experience Design' (UXD) to business development. An initial framework for UXD that he is co-developing with (ex) Philips colleagues will also be discussed. Ian will also briefly outline his interest in working with CUHTec.

Ian's slides (PDF) are available.

5th February
Helen Petrie & Chandra Harrison: Measuring users' emotional reactions to websites

There is currently considerable interest in the concept of "user experience" (UX), but how to define and measure this concept is still in a state of flux. Different definitions will be discussed, including the centrality of emotion in the concept. Therefore to create a measure of the emotional component of UX, an Emotional Word Prompt List (EWPL) was developed and then used in a retrospective verbal protocol evaluation of websites. Slightly less than half the words on the original EWPL were used frequently in the verbal protocols of their feelings produced by participants. However a list of 16 emotion words emerged from this study that will constitute a revised EWPL to be validated in a future study.

12th February
Andrew Monk: Futurology: predicting trends in assistive technology (AT) and service development

This talk will consider expected changes in older people's experience and expectations along with changes in the provision of consumer electronics in order to suggest future models for AT provision. It will be argued that the important problems that older people have with new technologies are cohort effects, that is due their experiences when younger rather than functional decline. It will also argue that the new service based model embraced by many manufacturers of consumer electronics will lead to new expectations in the future cohorts of the older old. Finally, it will be argued that current Telecare and AT initiatives in the UK put us ahead of the game in catering for these new service users

12th March
Bernd Ploderer: Social Network Sites and the Passion of Bodybuilding

In this talk I will discuss the ways in which people appropriate social network sites to pursue their passions. This research is based on a current ethnographic study of bodybuilding, which serves as an example for an extreme passion. I will describe the stages underlying this passion, starting with the development of the passion to stages where passion can turn into obsession. I will then discuss the role that social network sites play for the various stages and address the risks and limitations of existing social network sites.

Since this study is work-in-progress I would welcome suggestions on the analysis and presentation of the data as well as on opportunities for comparing the findings from bodybuilding with other passions.

Bernd Ploderer is a visiting student at Sheffield Hallam University from January to April 2009, hosted by Peter Wright. He works on his PhD in the Interaction Design Group at the University of Melbourne, supervised by Steve Howard and Peter Thomas.


Summer Term 2009

Date Speaker Title
(Links to abstract)
30 April
7 May    
14 May Hyesook Kim Informing design with emotional probes
21 May    
28 May Paul Cairns Some new results on immersion
4 June Alistair Edwards Relatively PC DVD
11 June Alistair Edwards New approaches in access to mathematics for blind students
18 June Greg Hale Towards a new psychology of entertainment, using schema theory to study film
25 June Sofia Abd Malik Use of mobile phones by older people in Malaysia and the UK

Abstracts

14 May
Hyesook Kim: Informing design with emotional probes

This talk will describe a method to inform the design of communication technologies that allow people with family members living abroad to feel appropriate emotions when communicating. Five participants in the UK and three in South Korea were recruited. They were all members of three-generational families, where at least one person is geographically separated from the others. Two interviews were conducted. In the first, they were asked about the members of their family and how they communicate. A box of 'things to do' was left with them. These emotional prompts included: Spirit of the Oracle cards with an invitation to write about the feeling they elicit with regard to their family; a digital camera with instructions, e.g., to photograph 'something you would like to share'; a contact diary to note times when communication was pleasant or unpleasant; a sheet on which to describe 'a family journey where I was very happy'. The second interview, a few days after the first, focussed on their responses to the probes. Both interviews were recorded and transcribed. They are now being coded using grounded theory analysis. Themes emerging include: reassurance with regard to intergenerational obligations; comfort and consolation from yearning, and establishing and maintaining identity.

28 May
Paul Cairns: Some new results on immersion

My third year undergraduates have been doing various projects for me in relation to immersion in videogames. In this talk, I would like to present some of their findings and how they fill out my current understanding of immersion. Specifically, they have looked at immersion in relation to presence, social gaming and a comparison with immersion in programming.

4 June
DVD: Relatively PC

This is the latest episode in the soap opera that is a series of plays produced by Dundee University about people's experience with technology - and particularly that of older people. In this episode one of the characters buys a PC - and then is not sure what to do with it, while others struggle with getting theirs to do what they want them to, for shopping, email and banking.

This play was produced as part of the EPSRC-sponsored cluster on Digital Inclusion which included members from York. At this showing there will be an opportunity for discussion - including insights from members as to how the DVD was produced.

11 June
Alistair Edwards: New approaches in teaching mathematics to blind students

Slides: PowerPoint, PDF

I have been involved in two European projects which had very similar objectives - of making mathematics more accessible to upper-secondary-school students. I will give a brief overview of these projects, of the similarities and differences between their approaches. I will also summarize some of the lessons learned.

One obvious observation is that the vast majority of blind students never reach that level of mathematical education. If we are to address this, then we will have to find ways of teaching basic mathematics to younger pupils. I will present some ideas as to how we might do that - in ways that might also make mathematics more interesting for sighted students.

18 June
Greg Hale: Towards a new psychology of entertainment, using schema theory to study film

This research used two short films to investigate whether schema theory has value for researching and designing entertainment experiences.

The first study used the neutrally rated Ice Cream Dream to qualitatively analyze talk from ten viewers, for research and design contributions based on schema theory. The analysis was systematic and driven by the data, with bottom up analysis iteratively structured by emergent schematic categories. The viewer’s talk indicated confusion about the film content and included talk on schematic structure in the film. The second study developed a method of schematic analysis to investigate schemas in a case study in good structure, The Wrong Trousers. The film’s content was systematically logged, with ‘behavioural schemas’ and ‘re-interpretive schemas’ emerging as new schemas that structure the film. All the schemas were causally linked with each other. The third study used schematic analysis to investigate Ice Cream Dream, both as a comparison to The Wrong Trousers and for research and design contributions from schema theory. Behavioural schemas were only partially evident, with content weakly linked causally or unlinked. The fourth study examined if non-interview based viewer’s talk would contribute additional insights and design implications from schema theory, using 65 online movie reviews of The Wrong Trousers. Systematic analysis revealed strong positive reactions focused on behavioural schemas plus two high salience elements (the techno trousers and the penguin).

This research has revealed that schema theory is powerful in identifying research based insights into film content, including the identification of two new structuring schemas. 23 final design implications resulted from the four studies, revealing that schema theory is also powerful in design terms. Further research will include schema based studies into other films, the development of a systematic Schematic Analysis Design Method (SADM) and the development of a descriptive modeling language for entertainment experiences.

25 June
Sofia Abd Malik: Use of mobile phones by older people in Malaysia and the UK

I will like to present the findings from two studies that were conducted in Malaysia and UK. The studies were about the current use of mobile phones by older people, focusing on talking methods that include interview and focus group. In addition, the use of personas was explored in the context of using it as a tool.


Autumn Term 2009

Date Speaker Title
(Links to abstract)
22 October Andrew Monk
(with Patrick Olivier, University of Newcastle)
Ambient Kitchen: designing situated services using a high fidelity prototyping environment
29 October
in Langwith L/037
Alastair Gill,
University of Surrey
Social Information in Computer-Mediated Communication
5 November Alistair Edwards (Almost) random thoughts on randomness
12 November Siân Lindley, Microsoft Research, Cambridge From playfulness to intensity: Expressing value through communication technologies
2pm
Wednesday
18 November
Thomas Green,
Visiting Professor, University of York
Information Structures, Notations, and Cognitive Psychology
Department of Computer Science Seminar (CS103)
19 November No Seminar
26 November Helen Petrie Measuring emotion in human-computer interaction
3 December Peter Kennaugh Identifying User Experience with Folk Usability Evaluations
10 December* John Robinson Computational Photography II: Beautiful Portraits
17 December Paul Cairns Symmetry and affordance

Abstracts

22 October
Andrew Monk, Department of psychology and Patrick Olivier: Ambient Kitchen: designing situated services using a high fidelity prototyping environment

The Ambient Kitchen is a high fidelity prototype for exploring the design of pervasive computing algorithms and applications for everyday environments. The environment integrates data projectors, cameras, RFID tags and readers, object mounted accelerometers, and under-floor pressure sensing using a combination of wired and wireless networks. The Ambient Kitchen is a lab-based replication of a real kitchen where careful design has hidden the additional technology, and allows both the evaluation of pervasive computing prototypes and the simultaneous capture of the multiple synchronized streams of sensor data. Previous work exploring the requirements for situated support for people with cognitive impairments motivated the design of the physical and technical infrastructure and we describe both our motivations and previous work on interaction design in kitchen environments. Finally, we describe how our lab-based prototype has been put to use as: a design tool for designers; a design tool for users; an observatory to collect sensor data for activity recognition algorithm development, and an evaluation test bed. The limitations and advantages of lab-based, as opposed to in situ home-based testing, are discussed.

29 October
Alastair Gill: Social Information in Computer-Mediated Communication

Online media increasingly enable us to develop and support social relationships. Although never easier to exchange richer forms of media, communication generally remains text-based. My research focuses on the communication of social information fundamental to understanding others in text.

In particular, my work shows that qualities such as personality, emotion and trust are characterised linguistically in a text-based environment (email, blogs, IM), and generally personality and emotion can be accurately perceived from short snippets of text. There are, however, some interesting wrinkles present in the results: For example, it is more important to consider which personality trait or emotion is being considered, than talking about general accuracies. Similarly, although I have found increased linguistic similarity relates to trust in dialogue, automatically generated dialogues including greater similarity were perceived negatively.

I will discuss some of the issues raised by this research, and conclude the talk by discussing the role of social information in computer-supported collaboration.

Alastair Gill is a Research Fellow at the Centre for Research in Social Simulation, University of Surrey, working with Nigel Gilbert. His research focuses on social aspects of computer-mediated communication and the related areas of human-computer interaction, computer-supported cooperative work, computational linguistics and cognitive science. He has previously held positions at the Center for Technology and Social Behavior, Northwestern University, and LEAD-CNRS, University of Burgundy, France. Alastair received his Ph.D. in Informatics from the University of Edinburgh in 2004 (supervised by Jon Oberlander), which he took following the M.Sc. program in Cognitive Science and Natural Language. His B.A. was in English Language and Literature.

5 November
Alistair Edwards: (Almost) Random thoughts on randomness

It seems that randomness may be an essential part of everyday life and of interactions between people. Might it not be, therefore, that a degree of randomness in interactions between people and computers might in fact be beneficial?

Yet, what is randomness? Computers are deterministic and therefore incapable of exhibiting truly random behaviour. At the same time people's perceptions of what is random are biased.

On the other hand, if a process is complex and therefore impossible to (accurately) model, is it any different from being random?

And where does chaos fit in?

These and other questions will be posed.

12 November
Siân Lindley, Microsoft Research, Cambridge: From playfulness to intensity: Expressing value through communication technologies

At the heart of user-centred design lies an understanding of what the user would need, be this technology that is easy to use, that links them to others, or that facilitates a particular type of experience. In this talk, I will consider how different types of experience might arise from, and be sought for through, the use of technologies that support expression and communication. In particular, I will report on a field trial of Wayve, a household messaging device that was found to evoke playfulness and creativity, and on a project with older adults, which led to an understanding of their approach to contact as being based on a need for focus and intensity.

Wednesday 18 November
(Computer Science Departmental Seminar, CS103)
Information Structures, Notations, and Cognitive Psychology

There has been plenty of talk about ‘information overload’, how sources of information can be combined, how social networking can create fast dissemination, and so on. To this potent mix I wish to add consideration of information structures: how information is stored and presented and communicated. We need to think about notations, the structures we use for communicating information, and what for lack of a better vocabulary I shall call ‘information artefacts,’ the documents and devices in which we store and manipulate information. My concern is not computational efficiency but psychological usability.

I shall touch lightly on (1) how notational structures appear to affect the way in which people create and study information artefacts (spreadsheets versus OO ... when to invest attention ...  why graphical notations are no panacea ....).; (2) how notational choices relate to communication and organisational roles (spreadsheets again ... );  (3) ecosystems of notations (coupled and collaborating notations); and (4) notations over time -- how notational space gets harmfully consumed, and how the laws of informational economics  seem to prevent future-proofing notations.  More questions than answers, of course.

Examples likely to range from Hampton Court maze to speech-driven programming and from LabView to metadata, some bizarre features of standard music notation, and maybe why paper is the opposite of juggling.

26 November
Helen Petrie: Measuring emotion in human-computer interaction

3 December Peter Kennaugh: Identifying User Experience with Folk Usability Evaluations

More and more people are now publishing their own content on the Internet in the form of blogs, reviews and videos. It should be expected that because of the origin of this user-generated content, it contains some amount of user experience information. Therefore its use to evaluate a device should give different results to the more traditional evaluation methods currently used in industry.

I shall be proposing a new evaluation method which uses specific types of this user-generated content to evaluate a specific device (the iPhone 3G), which we have named 'Folk Usability' evaluation. Results of using this method have been compared with two alternative forms of evaluation - 'professional' evaluation methods (e.g. Heuristic evaluation) and media reportings of evaluations, with noticable differences identified between the three. These differences shall be presented, with an argument that a technique similar to 'Folk Usability' evaluation may already be used in industry given to conclude.

10 December
John Robinson: Computational Photography II: Beautiful Portraits

Nearly two years ago I presented an HCI seminar on Computational Photography. This seminar is an update. We have been working on face image description and a recent turn has been the estimation of attractiveness or beauty in portraits. I will outline the computational mechanism but focus on results, including the performance of a beauty estimator applied to paintings from the National Portrait Gallery, and examples of the beautification or uglification of small portraits. The embodiment of our methods in iPhone apps raises some HCI questions.

*Andrew Howes

 Please note that Andrew has decided to give his talk on Understanding Users of Computer Systems as Bounded-Optimal Agents as part of the Psychology Department series, on Tuesday, 17 November.

Abstract

Arguably, any science and/or engineering discipline should benefit from theory that offers both relevance and predictive adequacy. The talk will describe recent developments in understanding human-machine interaction that start from the assumption that people are boundedly optimal agents. Bounded optimality, Russell and Subramanian (1995), was proposed a number of years ago as a framing assumption for Artificial Intelligence and recent demonstrations (Howes, Lewis, Vera, in press) suggest that it is a promising basis for understanding human behavior as well.

Russell, S. & Subramanian, D. (1995). Provably bounded-optimal agents. Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research, 2, 575--609.

Howes, A., Lewis, R.L. & Vera, A. (in press). Rational adaptation under task and processing constraints: Implications for testing theories of cognition and action. Psychological Review, in press.

http://personalpages.manchester.ac.uk/staff/howesa


Summer Term 2009

Date Speaker Title
(Links to abstract)
21 February Alistair Edwards Access to museums and galleries for visually impaired people
28 February Richard Ribeiro
Department of Computer Science
Identifying 'Hidden' Communities of Practice Within Electronic Networks: Some Peliminary Premises
6 March Chandra Harrison Morae from TechSmith - Not nearly as slippery as the eel
13 March Eduardo Calvillo
UCLIC, London
Assessing the Gaming Experience

Abstracts

21 February
Alistair Edwards: Access to museums and galleries for visually impaired people

There is an increasing awareness of the need for access to public places for disabled people. However, often this awareness is confined to the question of physical access, other needs, and particularly those of visitors with visual impairments, are often not addressed. I will present some approaches to achieving access which is more equal, using: tactile images, sound guides and combinations of these. We will explore their weaknesses as well as their strengths and where there are research opportunities to improve on them.

28 February
Richard Ribeiro: Identifying 'Hidden' Communities of Practice Within Electronic Networks: Some Preliminary Premises

The talk will discuss the possibility of discovering "hidden" (potential) Communities of Practice (CoPs) inside electronic networks, and how to use this knowledge to nurture them into a fully developed Virtual Community of Practice (VCoP). It will be discuss questions connected to this: the relation between CoPs, Virtual Communities (VCs), Distributed Communities of Practice (DCoPs) and Virtual Communities of Practice (VCoPs); the characteristics of "hidden" communities; the methods to search for "hidden" CoPs; how to clearly define a fully developed VCoP; and how to change "hidden" CoPs into fully developed VCoPs.

6 March
Chandra Harrison: Morae from TechSmith - Not nearly as slippery as the eel

Morae is video capture and analysis software for usability testing and user experience research that helps identify site and application design problems and share them with stakeholders. It is one of the leading analysis tools for usability testing and offers recording, remote viewing, video coding, data analysis, video clip facilities and survey functions. The HCI Group currently holds licence for the software and it has been used for several studies undertaken in the last few years.

The complexity of the programme makes it a useful tool for a variety of situations, but also requires a reasonable amount of experience to operate well. While Chandra does not profess to being an expert Morae user, in the course of her PhD research she has had numerous hours experience with the programme and would like to share her knowledge in lieu of a real seminar. The seminar will involve explanation of Morae and a demonstration of some of the main functions. Those of you already familiar with Morae may also want to contribute your experience during the seminar.

13 March
Eduardo Calvillo-Gamez: Assessing the Gaming Experience

In this talk I will present an overview of my PhD work. The research question driving my research is: how can we assess user experience? The grounding to find the answer is on Critical Rationalism. The focus of the research is on videogames, and in particular on the user experience of playing videogames, or gaming experience. In this talk I will discuss the approach to user experience used in the research, as well as the results obtained while studying the gaming experience. The results suggest that it is indeed possible to study user experience under falsifiability.


Spring Term 2010

All seminars are on Thursdays 1315-1415 in Computer Science CS103 - unless otherwise stated.

Date Speaker Title
(Links to abstract)
14 January
CS/202J
Thomas Visser,
TU Delft
The design and evaluation of awareness systems
21 January
CS/202J
Shamus Smith,
Durham University
Computer game experience bias in user evaluations
28 January Daniel Gooch
Bath University
Communicating a Sense of Presence using Thermal Stimuli
4 February Lucy Buykx
University of York
CHE - Improving heuristic evaluation through collaborative working
11 February Alistair Edwards
University of York
Randomness: Part 31 in a series of 2
18 February Sofia Abd Malik
University of York
Investigation of cultural dependency in mobile technology and older people
25 February Patrick Olivier
University of Newcastle
Multi-Touch Authentication on Tabletops
4 March Andrew Lamb
DirectGov
Title to be announced
Postponed
11 March Hyesook Kim
University of York
Design of technology to connect 3-generation families at a distance
24 March
CS/101
Richard Ribeiro
University of York
Searching for unseen communities of practice

Abstracts

14 January
Thomas Visser: The design and evaluation of awareness systems

Social awareness products and systems can increase people's feelings of being connected to their social network. Following a research through design process, I design awareness system prototypes to investigate how particular aspects of the systems contribute to this social connectedness. In parallel I am working on a methodology for evaluating the prototype systems in a real user context.

21 January
Shamus Smith: Computer game experience bias in user evaluations

In the development of user interfaces, user-centric evaluations are commonly performed. Anecdotal evidence suggests that factors such as prior experience with computer games may affect the results of such evaluations. This is of particular concern in the evaluation of virtual environments, which have many commonalities with modern 3D-based computer games. Computer game technology is also increasingly reused for research and industrial applications and this has implications on any related evaluations of such systems.

This talk will address gamer bias in (1) the context of the evaluation of a fire drill simulator and (2) the effects of previous computer gaming experience, user perceived gaming ability and actual gaming performance on navigation tasks in virtual environments.

28 January
Daniel Gooch: Communicating a Sense of Presence using Thermal Stimuli

Social Presence is the concept of 'being there', of emotional connectedness to another individual. As relationships are increasingly formed by spatially disparate partners, supporting social presence has become more important. However it remains a poorly understood concept. This presentation looks into the various factors that could impact social presence, before discussing the specific findings of an investigation involving thermal stimuli and social presence. The talk concludes with a discussion of various avenues of further investigation.

4 February
Lucy Buykx: CHE - Improving heuristic evaluation through collaborative working

Heuristic evaluation is a methodology popular with usability professionals. It identifies potential usability problems with interfaces before the need to commit large amounts of time and money with user testing. However the success has been challenged; high numbers of problems of a trivial nature are found and there is low agreement between problems found by different people evaluating the same interface. This study compared results from a standard heuristic evaluation with that from a variation where evaluators worked together to find usability problems. Results of the collaborative method showed a significantly higher agreement between the evaluators which indicates a higher reliability of problems found.

The study was performed as my masters project last summer. Helen Petrie wrote up a paper of the study which has been accepted for the UPA 2010 conference (Usability Professionals Association). In the talk I will cover the background, experiment design and results, and include some of the challenges found in analysing a large body of qualitative data to come up with some quantitative results!

11 February
Alistair Edwards: Randomness: Part 31 in a series of 2

In a previous seminar, I questioned the nature of randomness, its role in human behaviour and whether it is a necessary element of natural interaction. I proposed that the the universe was necessarily deterministic, but the suggestion was raised that the universe is in fact random, and we impose order (causal determinism) on it. In this seminar I will explore the latter approach.

I will extend the concept into one form of on-line interaction: gambling. Gamblers rely on the randomness of the software they use, but where does this faith come from and is it well-placed?

There will be sweets for the lucky winners in this seminar.

18 February
Sofia Abd Malik: Investigation of cultural dependency in mobile technology and older people

This is part of the PhD work that has been accepted in CHI 2010 under work in progress category. It covers about the studies using different methods that have been carried out of older adults' use of mobile technology in Malaysia and the UK. Preliminary results suggest that there are significant differences in the results which are culturallly dependent.

25 February
Patrick Olivier: Multi-Touch Authentication on Tabletops

The introduction of tabletop interfaces brings a pressing need for the development of secure and usable authentication techniques that are appropriate for the co-located collaborative settings for which they have been designed. Most commonly, user authentication is based on "something you know", but this is a particular problem for tabletop interfaces, as they are particularly vulnerable to shoulder surfing given their remit to foster co-located collaboration. In other words, tabletop users typically authenticate in full view of a number of observers. In this talk, I will introduce and discuss the evaluation a number of novel tabletop authentication schemes that exploit the features of multi-touch interaction in order to inhibit shoulder surfing. In our pilot work with users, and in our formal user-evaluation, one authentication scheme - PressureGrid - stood out, significantly enhancing authentication security when participants used it to enter PINs and Passfaces graphical passwords. I will also talk generally about tabletop technology and interaction research at Newcastle, and future directions.

11 March
Hyesook Kim: Design of technology to connect 3-generation families at a distance

This seminar will explain some of the results of a probe study where members of three-generational families, where at least one person is geographically separated from the others, talk about their emotional experiences. The method for eliciting this information is briefly described along with some of the themes identified in a grounded theory analysis. These include: sharing the moment with pride; reassurance with regard to intergenerational obligations; comfort and consolation from yearning; and little time to give comfort to one another.


Abstracts for postponed seminars

26 November
Sawit Kasuriya: Pilot experiments on children's voice recording

Automatic speech recognition is being used increasingly in a variety of applications. There is great potential for its use in educational applications for children. However, the accuracy of recognition of child speech is very low. There are probably a number of reasons for this, but one is the difficulty in collecting high-quality recordings of children to be used in the building of speech models. If a better interface can be provided between the child and the recording equipment then it may be possible to collect better samples. Interfaces have been designed to be tested to that end, using alternative interface paradigms: push-to-talk and a limited time recording with and without a progress bar. These alternatives will be compared by collecting speech samples and measuring their quality.


Summer Term 2010

All in CS103 - unless otherwise noted.

Date Speaker Title
(Links to abstract)
29 April No one No seminar
6 May
CS103
Will Miles
University of York
Gestures and maths(Postponed)
13 May
ATB/035
Andrew Monk
University of York
The inference of perceived usability from beauty
20 May No one No seminar
21 May
14.15
CS/202J
Will Miles
University of York
Gestures and maths
27 May Janet Read
University of Central Lancashire
Hey you - who R U callin' a designer?
3 June Alistair Edwards
University of York
Sonification strategies for examination of biological cells
Monday
7 June
Matthew Hudson
University of York
Semiotics and games
10 June Chris Power
University of York
Accessible culture: reaching broader audiences through personalization (Postponed)
17 June Lucy Buykx
University of York
Challenging assumptions : Older people's attitudes to technology and cooking (work in progress)
24 June Helen Petrie Recent usability and user experience work for DirectGov
12 July Sofia Abd Malik Cultural differences in use of mobile phones by older people

13 May
Andrew Monk: The inference of perceived usability from beauty

I will present some data that re-examine the relation between beauty and usability, that is, the implication that 'what is beautiful is usable'. In order to rectify previous methodological shortcomings, both products and participants were sampled in the same way and the data aggregated both by averaging over participants to assess the covariance across ratings of products and by averaging over products to assess the covariance across participants. In addition, we adopted an inference perspective to qualify underlying processes to examine the possibility that, under the circumstances pertaining in most studies of this kind where participants have limited experience of using a website or product, the relationship between beauty and usability is mediated by goodness.

21 May
Will Miles: Gestures and maths

In this literature review seminar I will be looking at the research that has been done on how maths is taught in primary schools, specifically how multiplication tables are learnt.  I then will show the different types of computer interface using gestures and then bring these two subjects together by looking at how the use of gesture can improve learning.

27 May
Janet Read: Hey you - who R U callin' a designer?

In this informative and lively talk, Dr Janet Read, a Reader in Child Computer Interaction at the University of Central Lancashire will explode the myth of children as designers. This myth, promoted in the last decade of the last century, arose from the belief that the participatory design approach, initially promoted for all sorts of social and political reasons, was necessarily valuable and adaptable to child centred design.

Beginning with a look at the history of the PD method, this talk will draw on examples from the research carried out at the  Child Computer Interaction Group in UCLan and will demonstrate several holes in the suggestion that children need to be involved in the designs of their own products. The talk will leave attendees asking some political and social questions about participatory practises and they will take a way some amusing, but relevant, stories about design studies with children.

3 June
Alistair Edwards: Sonification strategies for examination of biological cells

Cervical cancer is one of the most preventable forms of the disease thanks to the fact that pre-cancerous changes can be detected in cervical cells. These cells are examined visually under microscopes, but the objective of this project was to ascertain whether their examination could be improved if the visual inspection were accompanied by an auditory representation. A number of different sound mappings were tested. This paper also traces the way the sound experiments evolved in parallel with the underlying research on cell image analysis. The main conclusion is that in this kind of application, the important parameters to sonify are the ‘badness’ of the cell and the reliability of that rating, and some likely sound mappings to convey this information have been identified.

This will be a practice for a talk to be presented at ICAD 2010. Co-authors of the accompanying paper are: Andy Hunt, Geneviève Hines, Vanessa Jackson, Alyte Podvoiskis, Richard Roseblade and Jon Stammers.

10 June
Chris Power: Accessible culture: reaching broader audiences through personalization

(Abstract to follow)

17 June
Lucy Buykx:Challenging assumptions : Older people's attitudes to technology and cooking (work in progress)

Older people may find it difficult to shop, cook and eat healthy meals because of minor disabilities, reduced income and many have lost spouses meaning they now have to cook only for one. Engineering technology may help overcome diminished physical abilities, Interactive technologies may help provide relevant timely support and inspiration and enable better coping strategies, but may present difficulties for people with visual or motor impairments or who are unfamiliar with interactive technology. A series of focus groups explored the cooking and eating habits of older people and what they find useful and useless in the kitchen. Some common assumptions were held up, for example many participants found assistive devices such as jar openers useful. However the difficulties faced by growing older were not considered an impediment to good healthy cooking, rather a challenge above which experience could easily triumph.

23 June
Helen Petrie: Recent usability and user experience work for DirectGov

The HCI Group was recently commissioned by DirectGov to investigate methodologies for identifying government websites with severe problems that ought not go forward with the new government branding. We conducted a literature review of existing expert and user based methods for them and then conducted an empirical investigation, using six government websites. This presentation will give an initial overview of both aspects of the work.

12 July
Sofia Abd Malik: Cultural differences in use of mobile phones by older people

In the thesis seminar, I will present the results about studies using different methods that have been conducted in two countries (Malaysia and United Kingdom) focusing on the use of mobile technology and older people.


Autumn Term 2010

All seminars are on Thursdays, 1315-1415, but please note that they are not all in the same room.

Date Room Speaker Title
(Links to abstract)
21 October CSE/082 Chris Power Accessible culture: reaching broader audiences through technology
28 October CSE/082 Alistair Edwards Who is old?
4 November CSE/102 Chris Power Models of Accessibility in Higher and Further Education
11 November CSE/102 Helen Petrie & Sara Waszkiewicz Users' mental models of their Facebook privacy settings
18 November CSE/102 Alistair Edwards Future-proofing heritage
25 November CSE/102 Rebecca Randell
University of Leeds
Understanding work practice within diagnostic pathology: Implications for design
2 December CSE/102 Hyesook Kim Postponed
Field study of the TimelyPresent: Allowing family members to feel more connected
9 December CSE/102    
16 December TFTV John Mateer Guided tour of Theatre, Film and Television

21 October
Chris Power: Accessible culture: reaching broader audiences through technology

Cultural centres such as museums, libraries and music halls are all moving online and incorporating technology into their exhibits.  With the wide variety of audiences coming to these centres to experience culture in different ways, how can we ensure that everyone receives a meaningful experience?

This talk will look at the history of accessibility from its beginnings on the web with the infamous Web Content Accessibility  Guidelines (WCAG) and discuss the (little) impact these guidelines have had in making websites accessible and in raising awareness.  It will follow with a discussion of the new WCAG 2.0 and examine what it means for people employing technology in domains beyond the web

Finally, it will look at the future of technology and how we need to change the way we think about accessibility as a broader cultural community interacting with audiences.

The proposition is that we need to focus on the content being delivered, not the technology, and think about what is the meaning that we want to communicate to our audiences.

This talk was given as a keynote by Chris and Helen at the Museum Computer Group Conference in the winter of 2009 and repeated by Chris as a keynote at the Physical Digital conference in the spring of 2010.

28 October
Alistair Edwards: Who is old?

Much HCI research is aimed at 'older' users - but who are they? Age is a deceptive characteristic. It seems easy to define - in terms of the number of years a person has lived, but in practice it is a multi-dimensional property. We need to get a handle on those different dimensions if we are to try to work with these people as a group.

In this seminar I will explore determinants of age, particularly across different cultures.

As usual, I expect to raise more question than answers.

4 November
Chris Power: Models of Accessibility in Higher and Further Education

Continuing the (now) series of talks on different perspectives on accessibility, Chris will present the work that has been done by our HCI Research Group working in the European Approach for Accessibility Lifelong Learning (EU4ALL) project. York is responsible for the requirements gathering and evaluation of interactive systems produced by the project.

In this talk, Chris will present the requirements gathering activities that went on in the project, and how the data was analyzed. This analysis informed the creation of a conceptual model about accessibility in higher and further education, specifically driving from the preparation of content through to delivery in the classroom or online.  This conceptual model has been realized in system models that can be used for personalization of educational resources and services for people with disabilities.

11 November
Helen Petrie & Sara Waszkiewicz: Users' mental models of their Facebook privacy settings

Facebook is the leading social network site (SNS), which continues to thrive in spite of a number of recent controversies. One of these controversies concerned changes to users’ privacy settings and consequently user information available to different groups on Facebook. These changes started in December 2009, continuing until May 2010 and are possibly ongoing. This proved a very interesting and relevant backdrop to what started as a general study of whether users understand the privacy implications of SNSs and turned into a specific investigation of whether users understand the specific changes that Facebook has made to its privacy settings in the past year. This study conducted in depth interviews with 24 Facebook users. The interviews also included a number of different activities to elicit people’s mental models of privacy settings on Facebook. These talk explores some of the results of this study.

18 November
Alistair Edwards: Future-proofing heritage

This talk will have almost nothing to do with human-computer interaction but I will be giving it because:

  1. It should be of interest to other members of the group who are working on heritage-related projects.
  2. I need to practise the talk before I give it at the Royal Anthropological Institution.
  3. It fills a gap in the seminar programme.

Royal Anthropological Institution is a small but important organization which has a priceless collection of documents and photographs. It recently started to digitize some of its collections on a very modest scale. By way of a student project undertaken by Yu Lin, we have been advising them on technology and particularly on how they might avoid obsolescence of their digitized artefacts.

There are a number of interesting aspects to this project, including:

  1. The RAI personnel expected to do most of the work are not technology experts.
  2. The RAI is a poor organization.
  3. Access to the digital artefacts must be controlled, partly for copyright reasons but also because many of them are culturally senstitive.

25 November
Rebecca Randell: Understanding work practice within diagnostic pathology: Implications for design

Histopathologists diagnose cancer and other diseases by using a microscope to examine glass slides containing thin sections of human tissue. Technological advances mean that it is now possible to completely digitise such slides so that they can be viewed on a computer screen. This is a technology that has the potential to revolutionise work practice within diagnostic pathology, with promised improvements in safety and efficiency. Despite this, uptake of the technology is slow and previous studies report scepticism and uncertainty amongst potential users. As part of a project to develop a digital microscope, we conducted naturalistic observations that explicate the detail of how histopathologists accomplish their work, in order to produce an account of work practices in diagnostic pathology. Observations were combined with semi-structured interviews, to capture histopathologists’ perspectives on their work and their attitudes toward digital microscopy. I will present the findings of our studies and consider the implications of this for the design of a digital microscope.

9 December
Hyesook Kim: Field study of the TimelyPresent: Allowing family members to feel more connected

Postponed to 10 February.

16 December
John Mateer: Guided tour of Theatre, Film and Television

The Department of Theatre, Film and Television (TFTV) has recently moved into a new building with extensive facilities. This will be the opportunity for members of the HCI Group to tour these facilities with expert guidance from John Mateer.

Details of when and where to meet will be published nearer the time.


Spring Term 2011

All seminars are on Thursdays, 1315-1415, but please note that they are not all in the same room.

Date Room Speaker Title
(Links to abstract)
20 January CSE/083   Cancelled
27 January CSE/083 Alistair Edwards How to get you paper accepted for Chi
3 February CSE/083 Hyesook Kim Field study of the TimelyPresent: Allowing family members to feel more connected
10 February CSE/083 Sarah Wiseman Understanding number entry error
17 February CSE/083 Helen Petrie
Chris Power
Explorations in the use of card sorting
24 February CSE/083 John Precious User Experience: Analysis of Research prompted by Hassenzahl & Tractinsky’s Research Agenda Postponed
3 March CSE/083 No seminar - Computer Science Staff Meeting
10 March CSE/083 Paul Cairns The perils of designing questionnaires (Slides - PDF)
17 March CSE/102-3 Paul Cairns Using YouTube to study immersion

Abstracts

27 January
Alistair Edwards: How to get you paper accepted for Chi

This abstract - and seminar - could be very short:

Write an excellent paper on human-computer interaction

That's a good start, but it may not be enough, or rather, even if it is an excellent paper, there are things you should know so that you can further improve your chances of your paper being accepted. I have acted as an Associate Chair on the Programme Committee for Chi for two years, so I will explain how the review process works, in the hope that you will be able to use that process to your best advantage.

3 February
Hyesook Kim: Field study of the TimelyPresent: Allowing family members to feel more connected

‘TimelyPresent’ was developed to allow family members who are living apart in different time zones to feel more connected. For the TimelyPresent trial study, four participant families were recruited (grandchildren, their parents and grandparents) where at least one person is geographically separated from the others. Each family was allowed to use two TimelyPresents as a pair, for example, parents with children in the UK and the grandparents in South Korea. Each pair sends and receives a simple video message, ‘a present’ to each other across the two countries. The aim of study is to understand the problems and opportunities provided by participants trying out TimelyPresent and telling us about their experiences using it. Eight participants were interviewed after the first and second months of using TimelyPresent. In each interview, open questions were asked about how they felt about making and receiving presents, changes in the relationship with remote family, and the best and the worst things about TimelyPresent. With 15 interview recorded files in 12 hrs 27 min, 113 pages of transcripts were generated. The method for eliciting this information is briefly described along with some of the themes identified in a grounded theory analysis. Log information was also derived by recording the traffic of use of TimelyPresent. Some behaviours found through analysing it are addressed.

10 February
Sarah Wiseman: Understanding Number Entry Error

People are prone to errors in many aspects of life, including when entering numbers. The effects of these errors can be disastrous, for example when an incorrect number is entered when programming a medical infusion pump. Designing better systems may help to prevent these  errors however, in order to do this we need to understand far more about the types of errors being made, and their causes. Unfortunately, there are very few documented examples of number entry errors and thus many of the studies so far rely upon modelled, not real world data. This seminar will detail a study used to elicit number entry error and the process of coding the results and creating a taxonomy to organise them. The impact this taxonomy will have on future research will also be discussed.

17 February
Helen Petrie & Chris Power: Explorations in the use of card sorting

The card sort technique has many uses in HCI research and practice. Card sorts have traditionally been conducted with physical cards but now online programs are available for this task. It is unclear if results from an online version of this technique as reliable as the “oncard” version. This paper presents a study comparing oncard and online versions of the card sort technique for two website domains. Unexpected results will be revealed! The card sort technique was also able to reveal cultural differences between mental models of British, Chinese and Indian participants.

10 March
Paul Cairns: The perils of designing questionnaires

This talk presents of a critique of a paper that appeared in Interacting with Computers, which aimed to develop a short usability questionnaire. At first sight, it seems to have been developed well with good use of statistical methods and the design of the validation studies. However, closer analysis suggests that the whole approach is deeply flawed and draws into question the value of the questionnaire. I conclude with some more general lessons about questionnaire development in HCI.

Slides (PDF)

17 March
Paul Cairns: Using YouTube to study immersion

YouTube offers an previously unparalleled resource for getting directly at people, their perceptions and self-presentations. I am very interested in the immersive of experience of playing games. In this talk, I will present my first forays into using YouTube for studying gaming immersion with a view to perhaps getting a handle on the effect of social factors that influence immersion. The research style used is one that Mark Blythe and I have been developing which takes a multi-method approach to make the most of the richness of YouTube data.

Please note the change of venue: CSE/102-3


Summer Term 2011

All seminars are on Thursdays, 1315-1415 - except the Departmental seminar on Wednesday 4th May, which starts at 14.00. Also please note that they are not all in the same room.

Date Room Speaker Title
(Links to abstract)
28 April CSE/083   Cancelled
Wednesday
4 May
14.00
CSE/083 Gavin Doherty Computer Science Departmental Seminar
Designing Technology for Mental Health
5 May (No seminar: CREST Network meeting)
12 May CSE/083 Alistair Edwards The Crest Network
19 May CSE/083Chris Power
Helen Petrie
Further adventures in card sorting
26 May CSE/083 Chris Power
Helen Petrie
Remote testing of WCAG techniques
2 June CSE/083 Helen Petrie F for Fake: Four Studies on How We Fall for Phish
9 June CSE/083 Michael Harrison Modelling and analysing the interactive behaviour of an infusion pump
16 June CSE/083 Anna Bramwell-Dicks Music as an affective medium
23 June CSE/102-3 Helen Petrie F for Fake - Part 2

Abstracts

4 May
Gavin Doherty: Designing Technology for Mental Health 

Mental health difficulties are currently the leading cause of disability in developed countries (WHO metrics). While uptake of technology in the area has been slow, a variety of new technologies to support mental health treatment are emerging. Many of these aim to improve access to treatment and to provide more engaging and relevant treatment to clients, and particularly young people. However, technologies which suffer from usability problems or which fail to take into account the real needs of clients and the context in which treatment is provided are unlikely to succeed. In this talk I will discuss the unique challenges posed by this domain and the different ways we can use technology to help, and explore the issues by presenting our experience of development and evaluation of a number of systems, including game-based, phone-based and online e-mental health interventions.

12 May
Alistair Edwards: The Crest Network

The Creative Speech Technology Network (Crest), is a network sponsored by EPSRC with an objective of bringing together people from a wide variety of backgrounds to develop and use speech synthesis technology. It had its inaugural meeting on 5-6 May in York and all signs are that it was successful in bringing together a diverse group of people with the potential to do some exciting work.

In this brief talk, I will summarize the events of the first meeting, and also talk about the fun and challenges of setting up such a network - with funding.

19 May
Chris Power & Helen Petrie: Further adventures in card sorting

26 May
Chris Power & Helen Petrie: Remote testing of WCAG techniques

2 June

Helen Petrie, Mark Blythe & John Clark: F for Fake: Four Studies on How We Fall for Phish

This talk will report on findings from a multi-method set of four studies that investigate why we continue to fall for phish. Current security advice suggests poor spelling and grammar in emails can be signs of phish. But a content analysis of a phishing archive indicates that many such emails contain no obvious spelling or grammar mistakes and often use convincing logos and letterheads. An online survey of 224 people finds that although phish are detected approximately 80% of the time, those with logos are significantly harder to detect. A qualitative interview study was undertaken to better understand the strategies used to identify phish. Blind users were selected because it was thought they may be more vulnerable to phishing attacks, however they demonstrated robust strategies for identifying phish based on careful reading of emails. Finally an analysis was undertaken of phish as a literary form. This identifies the main literary device employed as pastiche and draws on critical theory to consider why security based pastiche may be currently very persuasive.

9 June
Michael Harrison:  Modelling and analysing the interactive behaviour of an infusion pump

This talk is concerned with the scaleable and systematic analysis of interactive systems. The motivating problem is the procurement of medical devices. In such situations several different manufacturers offer solutions that support a particular clinical activity. Apart from cost, which is a dominating factor, the variations between devices are relatively subtle and the consequences of particular design features are not clear from manufacturers' manuals, demonstrations or trial uses. Despite their subtlety these differences can be important to the safety and usability of the device. The talk argues that formal analysis of the range of offered devices can provide a systematic means of comparison. The talk also explores barriers to the use of such techniques, demonstrating how layers of specification may be used to make it possible to reuse common specification. Infusion pumps provide a motivating example. A specific model is described and analysed and comparison between competitive devices is discussed.

16 June
Anna Bramwell-Dicks: Music as an affective medium

Auditory research in HCI has historically focused on using sounds to communicate information to users in the form of auditory messages to improve effectiveness, efficiency or accessibility of interaction. As HCI research has expanded into the field of User Experience the auditory HCI research has been left behind. This seminar will discuss how music can be used in HCI to affect elements of user experience and behaviour by considering how other fields (including Sports Psychology, Marketing, Music Psychology and Education) already exploit the affective properties of music. The results of our first small study into music, emotion and email will also be presented (again!).


Autumn Term 2011

All seminars are 13.15-14.15 on Thursdays in CSE/083 except where noted.

Date Room Speaker Title
(Links to abstract)
13 October CSE/083 Paul Cairns
Alistair Edwards
My research and student projects
20 October CSE/102-103 Andrew Monk

Banking for the older old: what do they want?

27 October CSE/083 Helen Petrie
Chris Power
My research and student projects
3 November CSE/083 Rebecca Randell, Leeds Institute of Molecular Medicine, University of Leeds A virtual reality microscope for diagnostic pathology: physician centred design and experimental evaluation
10 November CSE/083 André Freire Empirical Results from an Evaluation of the Accessibility of Websites by Dyslexic Users
17 November CSE/083Lucy Buykx What cooks need from multimedia and textually enhanced recipes
24 November CSE/083 Jimmy Ang,
University of Kent
3D virtual environment in engaging older people in active living
1 December CSE/083 Chris Newell Should artificial voices 'ham it up'?
8 December CSE/083 Alistair Edwards Interface design in the Real World
15 December CSE/083 Alimran Nordin Immersion and time perception in games
19 December Harewood House
English mid-winter celebrations

Abstracts

13 & 27 October
Paul Cairns, Alistair Edwards, Helen Petrie & Chris Power: My research and student projects

These seminars are intended as an opportunity for members of the Group - and particularly new members - to find out about the kind of research that goes on in the group. Each of the speakers will outline their general areas of interest and demonstrate how these have been reflected in the projects undertaken by some of their students.

20 October
Andrew Monk: Banking for the older old: what do they want?

TThe work described here is to explore the experiences the eighty and ninety year olds when accessing their finances both now and throughout their lives by understanding their intimate financial biographies. The researchers, working closely with people in this age group, are proposing how more appropriate future banking experiences might be imagined and designed.

3 November
Rebecca Randell, Leeds Institute of Molecular Medicine, University of Leeds:
A virtual reality microscope for diagnostic pathology: physician centred design and experimental evaluation

Background: Histopathologists diagnose cancer and other diseases by using a microscope to examine glass slides containing sections of tissue. Technological advances mean that it is possible to completely digitise such slides so that they can be viewed on a computer screen, promising a number of benefits in terms of efficiency. Such increases in efficiency are essential, as an aging population and emphasis on early diagnosis results in greater pressure on histopathology services. However, it can take up to 60% longer to perform diagnoses using digital slides. The aim of the research presented here was to create and evaluate a virtual reality (VR) microscope that is as efficient as the conventional microscope, to support the introduction of digital slides into routine practice.

Methods: A VR microscope was designed and implemented by combining ultra-high resolution displays with VR technology, techniques for fast interaction, and high usability. The VR microscope was evaluated using a mixed factorial experimental design with technology and task as within-participant variables and grade of histopathologist as a between-participant variable. There were 16 participants in the evaluation.

Results: No significant difference in time to diagnosis was found between the conventional and VR microscope (F(1, 14) = 0.87, p > .05). There was a significant difference in the mean magnification used between the two conditions, with participants working at a higher level of magnification on the VR microscope (F(1, 7) = 40.18, p < .01). Subjective analysis suggests that on the VR microscope approximately double the magnification of that on the conventional microscope is required in order to identify diagnostic features.

Conclusions: These results, achieved with only minimal training, suggest that, with the right technology, efficient use of digital pathology for routine practice is a realistic possibility. Training in digital pathology should emphasise that this new technology does not replicate the conventional microscope and histopathologists need to relearn what they should expect to see at each level of magnification.

10 November
André Freire: Empirical Results from an Evaluation of the Accessibility of Websites by Dyslexic Users

This seminar will present results from an empirical study on problems encountered by users with dyslexia when using websites. The study was performed by a user evaluation of 16 websites by a panel of 13 participants with dyslexia, each website evaluated by 10 distinct users. The results presented are based on 693 instances of accessibility and usability problems. Most frequent problems were related to navigation issues, problems with presentation and organisation of information, lack or misfunctioning of specific funtionality in websites, and issues with language.

17 November
Lucy Buykx: What cooks need from multimedia and textually enhanced recipes

Using recipes in a step-by-step format with multimedia enhancements has been found to increase confidence and enjoyment of cooking but the field lacks research with cooks on the problems they encounter, so it is unclear what granularity of recipe step and associated multimedia would best support them. The current study observed 16 cooks prepare 3 dishes using recipes in 3 different formats to understand what problems cooks have with recipes. Recipe format had a significant effect on the ratings given to the recipe for clarity and ease of use but not on time to complete the recipe. Analysis of cooking activity and cooks' feedback shows that cooks want (i) step-by-step recipes with ingredient quantities in the recipe step; (ii) pictures of the interim states of the recipe; (iii) videos of preparation of unfamiliar ingredients; and (iv) videos of preparation techniques with different types of utensils.

24 November
Jimmy Ang: 3D virtual environment in engaging older people in active living

There is an increasing need to find innovative activities to help the older population to maintain a healthy life. 3D virtual worlds, which can provide social engagement, entertainment and creativity as well as useful information and services for older people might offer a solution to this issue. Although emerging studies have begun to look into the benefits of virtual worlds in healthcare, little has been done in the context of older people. I will explore various issues regarding the use of 3D among older people and a number of empirical studies that look into these issues. Specifically, the talk will focus on the profiles of older users and their motivations of using 3D technology through automated data crawling from a online community dedicated to 3D virtual worlds. The talk will also present a study that looks into social engagement in a 3D collaborative shopping environment, compared to a conventional non-3D one.

1 December
Alistair Edwards: Interface design in the Real World

Toby Churchill Ltd manufacture Augmentative and Alternative Communication (AAC) devices. In 2007 they released their latest product, the SL40 and I was asked to consult on the design of the user interface to this device. This is an interesting and difficult problem. Ideally such a device should ideally generate speech at conversational rates of around 150 words per minute (wpm). Very skilled typists may attain 60 wpm. Yet the kinds of people who have to use AACs cannot be skilled at typing; the conditions which mean they have to use an AAC (stroke, motor-neurone disease, brain injury etc) generally also affect their manual motor skills.

Where I would have wanted to apply user-centred techniques, commercial and practical limitations precluded this. Indeed, the reality of working in a commercial environment had a large effect on what I was able to do, and I will explain some of this in this talk.

8 December
Chris Newell: Should artificial voices 'ham it up'?

Computer generated artificial voices generally annoy or alienate people. Yet human voices that sound 'strange' may be expressive, engaging, alluring and exotic. Can the line between artificial (unappealing) and exotic (appealing) be said to be blurred when the context is right? Is that context performance; and if so can an artificial voice that is clearly performing a role, even 'hamming it up' be more appealing to listeners than a more understated voice. In brief can we invent appealing artificial voices that don't try to be real. In this short talk I will test the effectiveness of a well known artificial voice presented in the context of melodrama. The original meaning of melodrama was drama with music.

15 December
Alimran Nordin: Immersion and time perception in games

Immersion is the most widely reported experience of playing videogames. Associated with the report of immersion is the loss of the sense of time spent playing games. This research aims to investigate how time is perceived and lost while playing videogames and relate this to the level of immersion players experienced. This research will primarily involve psychology-style experiments with people playing different videogames under different conditions along with questionnaire/interview studies of the gaming experience. The results will be important for better measuring the gaming experience and hence understanding how immersive games might lead to addictive behaviours.

There will be lamingtons and mince pies.

19 December
English mid-winter celebrations

This year we will venture out to Harewood House. It's going to be an all-day event including our own private tour of the House.

Approximate itinerary is as follows:

9:30am
bus from the university
10:30am
arrive at Harewood House, coffee/tea
11:00
private tour of the house
12:15
lunch (not a full Christmas lunch this year, but will include hot soup, seasonal sandwiches, mince pies)
14:00 - approx 15:30 (depending on weather, we will decide on the day)
you are free to explore the gardens, gift shop etc
approx 15:30
bus back to the university

Cost will be £20 per person all included.


Spring Term 2012

All seminars are on Thursdays in CSE/082 except where noted.

Date Room Speaker Title
(Links to abstract)
19 January  CSE/082 Alistair Edwards Relatively PC
26 January  CSE/082    
2 February  CSE/082 Paul Cairns The cool wall of HCI (Go to the wall)
9 February  CSE/082 Paul Cairns Design criticism
16 February  CSE/082 Anna Bramwell-Dicks
Dave Swallow
The Big Question
23 February 3Sixty/RCHJohn Robinson, Electronics SWOT-ing the 3Sixty
1 March CSE/082 Dave Swallow Development in Context: Using Contextual Inquiry to explore the development of accessible websites
8 March CSE/082 Paul Cairns Can five be enough? Sample sizes in usability tests
15 March CSE/102-3 Sarah Wiseman Designing for the task: What numbers are really used in hospitals?
#errordiary

Abstracts

19 January
Alistair Edwards: Relatively PC

Relatively PC is a play on DVD, produced by the University of Dundee. The play illustrates the problems experienced by a group of older people who are trying to come to terms with modern information technology. The play is one of a series, produced in order to help with requirements ellicitation and to assist interaction designers to appreciate the needs of the variety of their potential users.

In this seminar we will view the play and then discuss it. It is to be hoped that the discussion will proceed on two levels. Firstly, what are the implications for design highlighted by the play? Secondly, is the technique a valuable one in attempting to improve design?

2 February
Paul Cairns: The cool wall of HCI

Borrowing an idea from a certain TV programme about cars , we will be constructing a Cool wall of HCI. Attendees should bring 2, or 3 or 4 examples of what they think is cool in HCI. We will then all vote as to where they belong, between Seriously uncool to Sub-zero.

The Cool Wall is now on-line!

9 February
Paul Cairns: Design criticism

  1. Bring some designs that have strongly influenced you. These may be because you love them. It may be because you hate them.
  2. Be prepared to talk for about five minutes on the design and then we can collectively discuss the value of the design and what insights we might gain from it and where this design lesson could be usefully applied elsewhere.
  3. Demos of the designs such as websites, videos, gadgets or whatever are welcome

What's a design? Anything - it could be a part of an interface, a whole interface, a  whole system of doing things or just a little trick that some system does well. It could be a game, a gadget, a website a bit of kit. Whatever. But it's a design not a process so no modelling techniques or research methods.

16 February
Anna Bramwell-Dicks & Dave Swallow: The Big Question

'Green' issues are a current hot topic in HCI (and the world in general). Anna is strongly of the opinion that we must be the generation that fixes the world. Whilst Dave doesn't care and would rather live in comfort now, than bother about the future of the planet.

As such, we would like to promote a debate about green HCI issues. Do you think they're important? Which camp do you belong to? Do you agree with Anna? Or Dave?

The session will start with brief presentations by Anna and Dave (good versus evil, if you like). Then we will split into two camps to discuss opinions further. Followed by a debate amongst the whole seminar group.

Come along prepared to argue your side, but also with an open mind, ready to have your views changed.

Hopefully this will be fun. Controversial opinions welcome.

Disclaimer: this abstract was prepared by Anna; hence, the blatant bias Smiley

23 February
John Robinson, Electronics: SWOT-ing the 3Sixty

The 3Sixty is a demo space within the Ron Cooke Hub that offers video/data projection onto four walls and 32 channels of sound. As Director of the Creative Technology Centre since October I have been working with others to identify collaboration, development, teaching and research activity in the 3Sixty. This seminar will show some of the material that has been developed across the full range of activity, but it is mainly about research. I will look at the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats of the technology and infrastructure and suggest areas in which it might allow the study of interesting research questions. Some of these are in HCI - particularly in information visualization and in computer supported cooperative work. I hope to get the group's insights, critiques and suggestions.

1 March
Dave Swallow: Development in Context: Using Contextual Inquiry to explore the development of accessible websites

There have been numerous initiatives over the last decade to improve web accessibility. However, numerous studies over the same period of time have demonstrated how web accessibility has barely improved and, in some cases, worsened.

The stakeholder with the greatest responsibility towards creating an accessible website is arguably the web developer yet few studies have considered the role in much detail. Those studies that have, have revealed that what web developers say about the accessibility of their websites and what they actually do in practice can be quite different.

To try and get to the bottom of this, David carried out a series of Contextual Inquiries with web developers in their natural habitat. In this seminar David will reflect both on what he has learned about web developers as well as the use of Contextual Inquiry as a qualitative research method.

8 March
Paul Cairns: Can five be enough? Sample sizes in usability tests

Usability testing is often set up like an experiment but uses only a handful of participants. This talk examines the argument forms that underpin usability tests and how these allow us to understand the sample sizes needed to conduct a good and useful test.

Slides (PowerPoint)

15 March
Sarah Wiseman:Designing for the task

In the English language, the letters of the alphabet do not occur with equal frequency. Some letters occur far more often than others, for example the letter ‘e’ occurs more frequently than ‘z’. In this talk we show that as with letters, digits too suffer from unequal distributions in some situations. Here we show that the most common digits being used when programming infusion pumps to administer drugs to patients are 0, 1, 2 and 5. The digit 9 is also frequently used to set an infusion to run at the maximum rate possible. With this information, we evaluate three current forms of infusion pump input with regards to the digits that are actually being programmed into the machines. We argue that the current number interface designs used in medical devices should take into account these findings in order to produce interfaces that are both more suitable for the task, and less error prone in use.

#errordiary

Understanding human error is an important part of making good choices about interaction design. In this paper we report an innovative approach to the collection of human error. Errordiary is an online repository of the funny, frustrating and sometimes fatal human errors that happen on a daily basis.


Summer Term 2012

All seminars are on Thursdays 13.15-14.15, in CSE/082 except where noted.

Date Room Speaker Title
(Links to abstract)
3 May CSE/082 Jon Sandles, Robin Stafford, IBM Developing Products in IBM - a User Experience perspective
10 May CSE/102-3 Nickey Nazatul Tactile Maps - An Alternative for People With Visual Disabilities
17 May CSE/082 Jonathan Hassell, Hassell Inclusion Signs of maturing in Accessibility and Inclusion
24 May CSE/082 Alistair Edwards The Cool Wall of Input Devices
31 May CSE/082    
7 June CSE/082Sam Simpson Can video games help to promote mental well-being?
14 June CSE/082    
21 June CSE/082 Ian Benest Computer-Based Teaching in Support of Learning - An Inclusive Strategy

Abstracts

3 May
Jon Sandles: Developing Products in IBM - a User Experience perspective

We will talk about how products are developed in IBM and the steps we take to ensure a good user experience. We will also discuss some of the User Experience Initiatives that are ongoing in IBM. We will provide a short demo of the products we are working on here in York, focussing on UX issues.

10 May
Nickey Nazatul: Tactile Maps - An Alternative for People With Visual Disabilities

Popular traditional methods such as walking white cane and guide dogs have been widely used to assist blind people in daily life. Limited spatial knowledge and access to places due to the lack of sight makes the world smaller for blind people than it is. Static tactile maps have been introduced for a long time to sought the mentioned problems. With the emerging of computer technology, a major enhancement has changed tactile maps. Through the combination of auditory capability and touch screen technology, multimodal tactile maps are presented. This seminar will be focused on tactile map, tactile and auditory interactions and the barriers existed between users and the map itself.

17 May
Jonathan Hassell, Hassell Inclusion: Signs of maturing in Accessibility and Inclusion

There are signs that Accessibility as a discipline and profession is maturing. Models such as the Accessibility Maturity Model from EFD and EU4ALL’s 4 Stage Model of Professionalism in Accessibility have laid out a potential roadmap. Prof Jonathan Hassell, an alumnus of the University of York, will lead a discussion on two recent initiatives that are moving accessibility along that roadmap. BS 8878 provides a Standard for embedding/institutionalising accessibility in organisations’ business-as-usual processes. And discussions at CSUN 12 this year led by the ATIA are making the case for an International Society of Accessibility Professionals.

Biography

Prof Jonathan Hassell is a thought leader in inclusion, with 10 years experience of embedding accessibility within digital production teams, and sharing best practice at international conferences.

He is the lead author of BS8878 - the new Web Accessibility British Standards, which situate accessibility in the sort of user-centred design processes familiar to all UX professionals. He based the Standards on his work as Former Head of Usability & Accessibility for BBC Future Media where he combined usability and accessibility disciplines to support user-centred-design across web, mobile and IPTV.

He has won awards for managing the accessibility features of BBC iPlayer, and for commissioning and product managing the personalisation tool MyDisplay, and the information site My Web, My Way.

Through Hassell Inclusion he provides inclusion training and consultancy to organisations worldwide, and leads innovation projects to make inclusion easier and cheaper to implement.

24 May
The Cool Wall of Input Devices

Bring your nominations for The Cool Wall

7 June
Sam Simpson: Can video games help to promote mental well-being?

Video games are becoming increasing more popular and there has been a lot of interest in games for improving physical health and managing a variety of illnesses. There is a plethora of self-help tools, in the form of books, cds and websites, but their efficacy is still not clear. This talk looks at the match between self-help for mental well-being and the possibilities for using games in this area.

21 June
Ian Benest: Computer-Based Teaching in Support of Learning - An Inclusive Strategy

This talk will indicate the project I intend to do in the next few years, drawing on work that is already in progress.

Central to the project will be a viewer: a next generation browser. The functionality, and the interface to that functionality, will be determined by a number of applications from the area of computer-based teaching. Some of the applications will, in their own way, offer a new(ish) approach to supporting students in their learning.

The overall design will be governed by the need to provide an integrated inclusive user-interface that supports the visually, aurally, cognitively, physically and age impaired. That is, an interface used by everyone, but one that does not interactively impede those without such impairments.

Information capture will focus on the lecture metaphor, and from this all applications will be generated automatically.

The talk will focus on the initial information repository; a (much) later talk will consider the interface to the automated teaching of a skill (in this case it will be electronic circuit design).

Angela Sasse, UCL: Security, usability, and productivity - why the current approach to designing security is bad news for all 3

When decision-makers don't care about usable security - get help from economics

Service providers use CAPTCHAs to stop bots from creating accounts. It is an example of a security solution that makes legitimate human users do work to keep the bots out - along with half of legitimate users. In the March issue of Scientific American, technology write David Pogue estimates that CAPTCHAs waste 17 years of human effort every single day. A small but growing number of security researchers has made similar arguments about passwords, certificates, and anti-phishing tools - they consume individual time and effort for little or no discernible reduction of risk. In this talk, I will review this research, present examples from our recent research on the impact of such mechanisms on productivity in corporate contexts, and how we use the evidence to convince decision-makers of the value of security.

Biography

M. Angela Sasse is the Professor of Human-Centered Technology and Head of Information Security Research in the Department of Computer Science at University College London, UK. A usability researcher by training, she has been working in Computer Science for 25 years. She began researching usable security in the mid-90s, and her paper with Anne Adams "Users are not the Enemy" - together with Whitten & Tygar's "Why Johnny Can't Encrypt" - started reseach in usable security.


Summer Vacation 2012

Date Room Speaker Title
(Links to abstract)
6 August
(14.00)
CSE/203 Lucy Buykx Designing for cooks: interactive instructions for everyday use

Abstracts

6 August
Lucy Buykx: Designing for cooks: interactive instructions for everyday use

My PhD research investigates how cooks engage with recipe instructions to understand and inform design of interactive recipe systems.

My initial research investigated how well the current research into human-food interaction design generalised for older adults. This led to a further question of how the cooking knowledge of older adults, such as in family recipes, could be shared through interactive technology. However, before designing to share recipes, we need to understand how people use them. Much of the existing research to help cooks has focused on developing innovative technology in the kitchen rather than theory and evaluation of how well the systems helped cooks.

My research contributes the first investigation of instruction design theory applied to interactive recipe system design. I report results from two studies of cooks preparing food from recipes in 5 conditions: control, segmented, integrated, segmented with pictures and structurally organised. The results indicate that cooks do not interact with recipe instructions as predicted; cooking from recipes is more complex than design for procedural instructions suggests. Results are not yet finalised but it seems small changes in interaction and instruction design can influence the confidence and success rate of cooks.

Autumn Term 2012

Please note the changes of location.

Date Room Speaker Title
(Links to abstract)
11 October CSE/082 Helen Petrie
Paul Cairns
Chris Power
Alistair Edwards
Research in the HCI Group and my favourite student project
18 October CSE/102-3 Alistair Edwards Design for Just One Person? Investigation of personas in web design
25 October CSE/102-3 Rasha Salah El-Din Human Factors in Mobile Security
1 November CSE/102-3 Aliimran Nordin Effect of Touch-Screen Size on Game Immersion
8 November CSE/082 Christopher Power Web accessibility for people with disabilities: current challenges and future approaches
15 November CSE/083    
22 November CSE/082 Paul Vickers,
University of Northumbria
Understanding Visualization: A Formal Approach using Category Theory and Semiotics
29 November CSE/082    
6 December CSE/082 Helen Petrie What Do Users Really Care About? A Comparison of Usability Problems Found by Users and Experts on Highly Interactive Websites
13 December CSE/082 Theodoros Georgiou The Sense of Touch and Human Haptic Perception

Abstracts

11 October
Helen Petrie, Paul Cairns, Chris Power & Alistair Edwards: Research in the HCI Group and my favourite student project

This seminar is aimed particularly at new members of the Group, including students on the MSc in HCIT. The speakers will introduce the topics that they research into. They also supervise related projects and in this talk they will introduce some of the MSc projects that they have supervised in the past, giving a taste of what is available to students.

18 October
Alistair Edwards: Design for Just One Person? Investigation of personas in web design

Personas are a tool that can be used in design, including of websites. A persona is a hypothetical archetype of an actual user. Each persona is given a name, a picture and a back story. These enable designers to discuss the needs of potential users in concrete terms, e.g. 'Amanda would not like that layout', or 'Remember that Zak has a visual disability. Would he be able to use that screen?'

The idea behind personas seems very attractive, but do we know they really work? It might be that different people develop different perceptions of a persona and hence effectively be designing for different people. This seminar will report on an investigation into this question carried out by HCIT student, Aiwen Tau.

She concluded

  1. People do form consistent impressions of personas in terms of their likely preferences for different website designs.
  2. People are not unduly influenced by the picture which accompanies the persona description.
  3. These results seem consistent whether the participants are specialist web designers or not.

25 October
Rasha Salah El-Din: Human Factors in Mobile Security

Mobile phone security is an emerging field of study. As the number of data-centric mobile phones grows, the industry experts expect them to face major security problems. We believe the first step to plan for countermeasure would be a comprehensive understanding of the mobile users' perception of risk. We report two studies to inspect such perception and confirm our findings by conducting a field experiment on mobile security.

1 November
Aliimran Nordin: Effect of Touch-Screen Size on Game Immersion

People are now able to enjoy playing their favourite videogames on different types of devices. In this paper, we investigate the influence on players' game immersion level by changing the size of the touch screen device used. We use two different sizes of touch screen device, iPod Touch and iPad, and let people play videogames on it, measuring their immersion level. We find that the level of immersion is higher for the larger touch screen size in comparison with the smaller one. The overall picture is therefore clear and suggests that different sizes of touch screen could be an important factor to influence immersion in videogames.

8 November
Christopher Power:Web accessibility for people with disabilities: current challenges and future approaches

With the increased importance of online commerce, government and leisure, it is essential that we find ways to ensure that people with disabilities are not digitally excluded from participation in everything the Web has to offer. Research into web accessibility is ensuring that people with disabilities can use the web equally through good design principles and good evaluation techniques. One of the key ways of measuring whether a website is accessible is to test web content to see if it meets the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines provided by the Web Accessibility Initiative of the W3C. While these guidelines are the foundation of a great deal of research and practice, there is lack of evidence regarding the effectiveness of these guidelines in meeting the needs of people with disabilities on the Web. The presenter will describe an empirical study with 32 blind users undertaking tasks on 16 different websites. These tasks yielded 1383 instances of problems the users encountered while interacting with the websites. These problems were analysed to determine what were the most common types of problems encountered by blind users on websites as well as the relationship of those problems to the current Web Content Accessibility Guidelines. The results provide much needed evidence into the effectiveness of the current guidelines and where there are gaps that need to be addressed. The presentation will close with a discussion of the implications of the results of the study for future work in accessibility. The speaker will also reflect on the current approaches to accessibility and propose that a new direction in research and practice is needed to successfully meet the needs of people with disabilities on the Web.

22 November
Paul Vickers: Understanding Visualization: A Formal Approach using Category Theory and Semiotics

We combine the vocabulary of semiotics and category theory to provide general framework for understanding visualization in practice, including: relationships between systems, data collected from those systems, renderings of those data in the form of representations, the reading of those representations to create visualizations, and the use of those visualizations to create knowledge and understanding of the system under inspection. The resulting framework is validated by demonstrating how familiar information visualization concepts (such as literalness, sensitivity, redundancy, ambiguity, generalizability, and chart junk) arise naturally from it and can be defined formally and precisely. Further work will explore the power of the categorical description to compare visualization processes across modalities.

6 December:
Helen Petrie: What Do Users Really Care About? A Comparison of Usability Problems Found by Users and Experts on Highly Interactive Websites

Expert evaluation methods, such as heuristic evaluation, are still popular in spite of numerous criticisms of their effectiveness. This paper investigates the usability problems found in the evaluation of six highly interactive websites by 30 users in a task-based evaluation and 14 experts using three different expert evaluation methods. A grounded theory approach was taken to categorize 935 usability problems from the evaluation. Four major categories emerged: Physical presentation, Content, Information Architecture and Interactivity. Each major category had between 5 and 16 sub-categories. The categories and sub-categories were then analysed for whether they were found by users only, experts only or both users and experts. This allowed us to develop an evidence-based set of 21 heuristics to assist in the development and evaluation of interactive websites.

13 December
Theodoros Georgiou:The Sense of Touch and Human Haptic Perception

'If touch is not a single perception, but many instead, then its purposes are also manifold', Aristotle (384-322 BC) De Anima

This quotation by Aristotle aptly describes the complexity of content and structure embodied in the sense of touch. It is the only sense exhibiting properties so variable in scope and one that remains as puzzling today as it did two millennia ago, understood only in terms of its principal features.

Even though touch is the earliest sense to develop in an embryo, and it is a sense that many have argued it is the one that makes the awareness of ones surrounding and consciousness of self possible, there is still no one comprehensive theory on the sense of touch and too many questions are still left unanswered.

My research aims in the better understanding of touch and haptic perception. With the use of haptic devices and virtual objects with deformable textures we can better understand how humans perceive physical


Spring Term 2013

All seminars are on Thursdays, 13.15-14.15 unless otherwises stated (note the exception on 27 February). Also they are mostly in CSE/082 - except when they are not.

Date Room Speaker Title
(Links to abstract)
17 January CSE/082    
24 January CSE/082 Alistair Edwards Who is old - and why should we care?
31 January     No seminar
7 February     No seminar
Wednesday
13 February
13.15-14.15
CSE/102-3 Cagla Seneler Personalized Information for learning styles and cultural differences: the case study of museum websites
14 February CSE/082 Frank Soboczenski Reducing number-entry errors in healthcare
15 February
09:15-10:15
CSE/101-2 Jan Gulliksen
KTH, Stockholm
Agile and User Centred Design Integration-What Lies Beneath and What Lies Ahead
21 February CSE/082 Andy Shaw Demonstration of eye-tracking hardware
Wednesday
27 February
14.00-15.00
CSE/082-3 Paul Cairns Computer Science Department Inaugural Seminar:
Immersion in digital games
Wednesday
6 March

14.00-15.00
CSE/082-3 Darren Treanor
Leeds Teaching Hospitals NHS Trust
Computer Science Department Seminar:
The Leeds digital pathology workstation: designing, developing and evaluating for diagnostic use
14 March CSE/102-3 Paul Cairns Teaching-led research

Abstracts

24 January
Alistair Edwards: Who is old and why should we care?

I have been invited to give a seminar in Glasgow and will practise it before I go. Hence this is similar to a seminar I gave to the Group some time ago, but will be expanded to cover work by a number of students since then, including Sherry Hisham and Sofia Abd Malik.

There is an increasing interest in researching the use of technology by older people. There are good demographic and economic arguments for this, but it raises some interesting questions, including:

definition
Who is old? In researching the technology, which agegroup(s) of people should we use? Is this culturally-dependent? If we can identify the group, what should we call them? 'Older adults', 'senior citizens', 'elders'...?
attitude
Do older adults necessarily have a negative attitude to technology? If so why, and how to overcome it. Is there a generational effect? Is this a temporary effect to be overcome as technologies continue to spread?

14 February
Frank Soboczenski: Reducing number-entry errors in healthcare

Entering numbers in different devices is a routine task in daily life. However, humans are prone to errors. In healthcare, where people have to program medical devices such as infusion pumps the effect of an incorrect number can quickly change an ordinary task into a dangerous situation. Previous work has shown that very few systems detect errors or help to prevent erros from escalating. At first I am going to present results of studies based on the potential effect of specific design features for medical devices. This is then followed by a discussion of more recent and surprising results of studies, based on well developed concepts from cognitive psychology, which may have significant implications for the future design of safety-critical systems.

15 February
Jan Gulliksen: Agile and User Centred Design Integration-What Lies Beneath and What Lies Ahead

Agile development methodologies, and particularly Scrum is receiving increasing attention in all parts of interactive software development. And for good reasons. However, many of the concepts from user-centred design also fits in the agile philosophy, but without actually supporting UCD or contributing to the development of usable systems by itself. This keynote address will present results from a large study with the purpose of understanding the conditions for working with usability and user experience in agile projects. I will present the main obstacles to working with usability in agile projects and also show some of the success stories. Finally I will discuss how UCD need to develop to meet the agile philosophy.

This is a keynote address for the workshop Agile and User  Centred Design Integration - What Lies beneath and What lies Ahead  (AUCDI 2013)

14 March
Paul Cairns: Teaching-led research

Modern academic life has two important roles teaching and research. The entire discourse around teaching and research though, as embodied in institutional structures, works to separate teaching and research into entirely different domains. The only nod towards a deeper integration is the occasional and un-monitored use of the term "research-led teaching." However, this flies in the face of the tradition of what a university is. I therefore reflect on the possibility of a tighter integration of teaching and research espousing the idea that perhaps we should only do research that we can teach about, that is, teaching-led research. I base my reflections on my own experiences of teaching based on my research from first year undergraduates to MSc students. I point out the benefits to me and my students but the drawbacks in gaining recognition for the value of this sort of work. This is not an HCI talk as such but obviously is embedded in my own research into HCI. It should be of relevance to anyone who is interested in (my idiosyncratic view of) academic life or has suffered being one of my students.

Summer Term 2013

All seminars are on Thusdays, 13.15-14.15. They are a bit nomadic this term; please refer to the rooms listed below.

Date Room Speaker Title
(Links to abstract)
25 April CSE/082 Alistair Edwards CreST: The Creative Technology Research Network
2 May CSE/083   No seminar
9 May CSE/102-3 Bláithín Gallagher An introduction to assistive technologies, Part 1
16 May CSE/083 Bláithín Gallagher An introduction to assistive technologies, Part 2
23 May CSE/082 Helen Petrie (co-author: Sharon McDonald, University of Sunderland) The effect of global instructions to think aloud on usability testing
30 May CSE/082 Alistair Edwards, Helen Petrie An introduction to assistive technologies, Part 3
6 June RCH/037 Alistair Edwards Accent the Positive
13 June CSE/082 Ana Isabel Grimaldo Martinez The interaction between children and the elderly in the use of digital games
20 June CSE/102-3 (TBC)  

Abstracts

25 April
Alistair Edwards: CreST: The Creative Technology Research Network

CreST was a network, sponsored by EPSRC. The main objective was to bring together people from very diverse backgounds who all had an interest in speech technology. As well as technologists we had poets, writers, actors, musicians, speech and language therapists and technology users. In this seminar I will summarize some of the activities of the Network, which culminated in a roadshow - and a lot of materials in different media.

9 May
Introduction to assistive technologies Part 1

Overview of relevant disability related issues. Introduction to assistive technologies used by people with vision and hearing loss.  Exercises simulating different types of vision loss.

16 May
Introduction to assistive technologies Part 2

Demonstrations of a screenreader by a blind colleague and a screen magnification programme (by a non-partially sighted colleague).

23 May
The effect of global instructions to think aloud on usability testing

Verbal protocols are the primary tool for understanding users' task-solving behaviours during usability testing. We investigated whether the classic think-aloud and a think-aloud with an explicit instruction leads to different task solving performance compared to silent working. The results suggest that the classic method had no impact on task performance whereas the explicit instruction led to an increase in within-page and between-page navigation and scrolling activity. The classic method was linked to an increase in mental workload in terms of effort and frustration. The explicit think-aloud led to an increase in mental demand, performance, effort and frustration.

May 30
Introduction to assistive technologies Part 3

This session will cover alternative and augmentative communication (AAC) technology that is used by people who cannot communicate by speaking. It will also cover technology used by people with dyslexia and related learning difficulties.

6 June
Alistair Edwards: Accent the Positive

The way people speak tells a lot about their origins - geographical and social. But when someone can only speak with the aid of an artificial voice (Stephen Hawking is the most celebrated example), then conventional expectations are subverted. This lecture will explore some of the limitations - and new possibilities - of speech technology.

This will be a practice for the lecture I will be giving as part of the Festival of Ideas.

13 June
Ana Isabel Grimaldo Martinez: The interaction between children and the elderly in the use of digital games

Over the years, many studies have focused on the use of technology amongst older adults to maintain and improve their wellbeing. One of the example is the use of digital games. It is argued that digital games help the elderly both for their physical and cognitive welfare. Nevertheless, research shows that the socialization of the elderly is also an important factor to improve their wellbeing. Therefore, this research focuses on the understanding of the impact of the socialization between elderly people and children whilst playing digital games. This talk presents the results obtained from the assessments carried out to understand the implication of the use of digital games amongst elderly people and their interaction with children during the gaming session.


Autumn Term, 2013

Unless otherwise stated, seminars will start at 13.30 and will be in CSE/102-3.

Date Speaker Location Title
(Links to abstract)
3 October
15.00
Fatma Layas CSE/102-3 Crowdsourcing to support students with disabilities
10 October Charlene Jennett
UCL
CSE/102-3 Motivations for Participating in Citizen Science
17 October Helen Petrie, Paul Cairns, Chris Power & Alistair Edwards CSE/102-3 My research and my favourite student project
24 October Heli Rantavuo
Head of Design Evaluation, Nokia
CSE/102-3 "So, what are the users saying?" How UX expertise can inform business questions
31 October Silke Goebel
Department of Psychology
CSE/102-3 Postponed Space & language: How they influence number processing and arithmetic
7 November Silke Goebel
Department of Psychology
CSE/102-3 Space & language: How they influence number processing and arithmetic
14 November Everyone CSE/082-3 Flash Mob User Testing
14.00-15.00 Wednesday
20 November
Sultan Khalil CSE/204 Web Accessibility
21 November Anna Bramwell-Dicks CSE/102-3 Affective Musical Interaction: Thesis Seminar
28 November Frank Soboczenski CSE/102-3 The effect of user interface elements on transcription tasks to reduce number-entry errors
5 December Tom Khabaza
Independent Consultant & Chairman of the Society of Data Miners
CSE/102-3 Data Mining, Cognition and Organisations: The foundations of Predictive Analytics

Abstracts

10 October
Charlene Jennett: Motivations for Participating in Citizen Science

Citizen science is a type of crowd-sourcing, where volunteers ('citizen scientists') collaborate with professional scientists to conduct scientific research. For example in 'Old Weather', volunteers visit the project's website and use an online transcription tool to transcribe digitized pages of 19th century handwritten ship logs. In 'Noise-Map', volunteers download a mobile phone app, which they use to collect and send data about levels of noise pollution in their local area. In this talk I will give an overview of three kinds of citizen science projects - volunteer computing, volunteer thinking and volunteer sensing. Then I will describe our research in Citizen Cyberlab, where we have conducted a series of interviews to understand volunteers’ motivations for joining a citizen science project and their reasons for continuing to take part in (or dropping out of) a project. Based on these findings, I will present several design recommendations for improving the experiences of volunteers.

Biography: Dr Charlene Jennett is a Research Associate at the University College London Interaction Centre (UCLIC). She works on Citizen Cyberlab, a 3 year research project comprised of 7 partners based in France, Switzerland and the UK. Charlene’s role is to evaluate social and cognitive processes in citizen science projects. E.g. what factors motivate a person to join a citizen science project and continue taking part? How can we improve the experiences of volunteers? Charlene has expertise in using a range of methods to study user experience, including interviews, questionnaires and eye tracking.

UCLIC website: http://www.uclic.ucl.ac.uk/

Citizen Cyberlab website: http://citizencyberlab.eu/

17 October
Helen Petrie, Paul Cairns, Chris Power & Alistair Edwards: My research and my favourite student project

This seminar is aimed particularly at new members of the Group, including students on the MSc in HCIT. The speakers will introduce the topics that they research into. They also supervise related projects and in this talk they will introduce some of the MSc projects that they have supervised in the past, giving a taste of what is available to students.

24 October
Heli Rantavuo: "So, what are the users saying?" How UX expertise can inform business questions

UX designers and researchers apply the human centred approach at the crossroads of technology innovation, productisation, design, and marketing. They may be approached from all of these directions for knowledge on users and how to design for them. Through my experiences at Nokia, I will discuss how UX professionals can extend their expertise beyond the context of design and R&D into also informing questions of product competitiveness and business strategy.

7 November
Silke Goebel: Space & language: How they influence number processing and arithmetic

In this talk I will give an overview of my (psychological) research on number processing and arithmetic. In the first part I'll show results from behavioural, neuroimaging and cross-cultural studies showing that representations of number and space are linked. The second part focuses on linguistic influence on number processing and arithmetic.

14 November
Everyone: Flash Mob User Testing

November 14 is World Usability Day. The HCI Research Group will be celebrating the day with a Flash Mob User Testing event. Come along and learn something about the different techniques that HCI people use to evaluate interfaces and take part in the the first ever flash mob user testing. It will be a lot of fun and might even be scientifically interesting. There will be lots of sweets and treats to encourage participants and three prizes of Amazon gift vouchers worth £20 for the 'best' participants. All will be made clear on the day! Everyone in the department (staff and students) is very welcome to join us in CSE/082-083

21 November
Anna Bramwell-Dicks: Affective Musical Interaction: Thesis Seminar

Music psychologists have amassed a vast range of evidence demonstrating that music affects listener behaviour or listener experience in a variety of ways within numerous contexts. My research considers whether we can incorporate music within technological interfaces to improve user performance and experience.

My PhD research has focused on investigating this hypothesis within 3 different domain areas: Copy typing, Gaming and Working at a Computer. This seminar will tell the story of my Thesis starting with the Research Motivation, providing details of the experiments performed so far, as well as explaining how the complex outcomes add to our understanding of the affectivity of different attributes of music.

28 November
Frank Soboczenski: The effect of user interface elements on transcription tasks to reduce number-entry errors

Many tasks in daily life require transcribing information accurately from one medium to the other, for example, programming an autopilot on an airplane or entering patient data in an electronic records system. However, humans make errors frequently. While most of the errors in daily life are little more than an inconvenience in safety-critical domains, such as healthcare, a small error like typing the wrong number when programming a medical device can have grave consequences. Despite potentially fatal consequences of errors, very little is known about the errors people make using medical devices, such as infusion pumps, and how the devices themselves influence the errors made. I present my work which investigates the effect of specific interface design features for infusion pumps on reducing errors. However, efforts focussed on specific design features, such as the start-position of the cursor on an infusion pump display, are fairly limited to a specific device or device series. Inspired by results from cognitive psychology, which suggest that representing information in a poorer quality format increases the likelihood of memorising the information more accurately, I have also investigated the effects of the application of such a theory on reducing number-entry errors in transcription tasks. Results show that this can significantly decrease the number of errors people make in transcription tasks. The potential impact of this work could be a valuable contribution for domains where accuracy is of great importance.

5 December
Tom Khabaza: Data Mining, Cognition and Organisations: The foundations of Predictive Analytics

Motivated by the need for business-oriented tools, the standard data mining methodology CRISP-DM describes the process of data mining, but does not explain why the process has the form that it does. The 9 Laws of Data Mining list key characteristics of the process, and explain the reasons behind its form. Many of these laws and reasons are founded on cognition and concepts from Artificial Intelligence. Data mining can be seen as a key element in the cognition of organisations, in which it plays operational, strategic and transformational roles. Knowledge is at the heart of data mining, and the knowledge possessed by an organisation is the basis of its perception, thinking, action and learning.


Spring Term, 2014

Seminars will be at 13.13-14.30. Unless otherwise stated, they will be in CSE/082.

Date Speaker Room Title
(Links to abstract)
16 January Helen Petrie & Bláithín Gallagher CSE/082 A critical review of research on technology for disabled and older people: 2005 - 2012
23 January Amelia Jupit CSE/082 Identity in Game
Alena Denisova Immersion in Digital Games: Expectations and Distractions
Jo Pugh They call me the seeker: searching and finding in digital collections
30 January David Flatla
University of Dundee
CSE/082 Do You See What I See? Modelling and Accommodating Differences in Colour Perception
6 February José Abdelnour Nocera
University of West London
CSE/082 Designing for Diversity
13 February Oscar de Bruijn
University of Manchester
CSE/082 Computer-Supported Collaborative Work
20 February Rod Walsh
Tampere University of Applied Sciences
Finland
CSE/082 Experiences with HCI in Social Robotics
27 February Alimran Nordin CSE/082 Estimating Single Estimate Effect From Multiple Studies Using Meta-Analysis
Zaidatol Haslinda “Linda” Sani CSE/102
14.30
Using technology to address the problem of malnutrition in older adults
Saja Althubaiti CSE/102
15.00
Usable Security - Authentication
4 March Sorachai Kamollimsakul CSE/102
13.30-14.30
Web design guidelines for older people in Thailand and the UK
6 March Tommy Yuan CSE/082 Software for autistic children
13 March Anna Cox CSE/082 Should I Reply to this Email? Email Response Patterns as a Function of Inbox-level Cues

Abstracts

16 January
Helen Petrie and Bláithín Gallagher: A critical review of research on technology for disabled and older people: 2005 - 2012

Research on new technologies to assist disabled and older people is of great importance, yet often it is not driven by the real needs of the users or an understanding of their problems, wishes and desires. We are conducting a critical review of research over the past seven years on the research on assistive and mainstream technologies for disabled and older people, looking at what issues have been researched, what methods have been used, to what extent the needs of disabled and older people are taken into consideration, and to what extent technologies are evaluated with the target user groups.

23 January
Amelia Jupit: Identity in Game

Games allow players to master new challenges, the freedom to choose their own path and to connect with other characters, either played by other players or a non-playable character (NPC) (Rigby and Ryan, 2011). When people play games, they can be different people, using different identities than who they are in the real world. Identification in games is recognised for its potential component in game experience (Klimmt et al, 2010). There are studies that have attempt to define player's identification with the game through avatar customisation, gender bending, narratives and self-discrepancies, to name a few. However, these studies differed at varying degree in their concepts of player's identification with the game. How players play the game and interact with the characters they embody in the game is important as this shows how both players and game designers set their priorities (Murphy, 2004). My research question is looking at how our game play shapes our identities. To start with, I am working on a grounded theory to investigate what players themselves mean by identity and how they form their identities in the game.

Alena Denisova: Immersion in Digital Games: Expectations and Distractions

Since video games became commercially available in 1970s, they quickly became one of the most popular means of spending time, leading to the growth of video game industry into the world's largest entertainment medium in the last few years. Now digital games comprise of a large and growing share of our time and energy, and it is important to understand this success not only from the point of view of companies that produce these games, but most importantly from the player's point of view. Recent research into understanding player experience unveiled multiple theories — describing some requirements that lead to a positive gaming experience, and immersion is one of these theories. It is suggested that immersion in digital games occurs when the game conventions closely match the player's expectations. Based on this assumption, the aim of this research is to create a model that explains immersion through a series of experiments.

30 January
David Flatla: Do You See What I See? Modelling and Accommodating Differences in Colour Perception

In digital environments, colour is used for many purposes: for example, to encode information in charts, signify missing field information on websites, and identify active windows and menus. However, many people have inherited, acquired, or situationally-induced Colour Vision Deficiency (CVD - commonly called colour blindness), and therefore have difficulties differentiating many colours. Recolouring tools have been developed that modify interface colours to make them more differentiable for people with CVD, however these tools rely on models of colour differentiation that do not represent the majority of people with CVD. As a result, existing recolouring tools do not help most people with CVD. To address this, I developed Situation-Specific Modelling (SSM), and applied it to colour differentiation to develop the Individualized model of Colour Differentiation (ICD). In this talk, I will describe the iterative development of the ICD, and its application to obtain a user-specific recolouring tool. I will then discuss three of my more recent projects: augmented reality personalized simulations of CVD, user-adaptable techniques for environmental colour identification, and world-wide identification of eye disease.

6 February
José Abdelnour Nocera: Designing for Diversity

Through my experience as researcher and practitioner in cross-cultural design projects for over ten years, I have come to realize that the biggest challenge is not one of adapting design for or with local cultures but one of making visible those aspects of reality that are obvious but invisible to all stakeholders. This requires translation of tacit knowledge and views through cultural and disciplinary boundaries: professional, local, and religious, among others. This translation can only occur by reconciling top-down and bottom-up approaches to culture-centred design .

About José

José is Reader in Sociotechnical Design and Head of the Sociotechnical Centre for Internationalisation and User Experience at the University of West London. His interests lie in the sociotechnical and cultural aspects of systems design, development and use. In pursuing these interests, he has been involved as researcher and consultant in several projects in the UK and overseas in the domains of mHealth, e-learning, social development, e-commerce, e-governance and enterprise resource planning systems. Dr. Abdelnour-Nocera gained an MSc in Social Psychology from Simon Bolivar University, Venezuela and a PhD in Computing from The Open University, UK.

13 February
Oscar de Bruijn: Computer-Supported Collaborative Work

I will be talking about my research into Computer-Supported Collaborative Work (CSCW). Firstly, I will discuss an experiment investigating how satisfaction with group decisions is influenced by changes in group dynamics in group-to-group video conferencing sessions. In particular, the experiment was designed to test the following hypotheses:

  • H1: Group member satisfaction is positively associated with the utility of the activity
  • H1a: Utility is mediated by the relative number of people in each group (subgroup size)

I will report the results of an experiment designed to test these hypotheses in which groups of participants were engaged in a decision making task. Each group was split either evenly or unevenly across two locations and linked by a video conferencing system. The results were:

  1. Satisfaction is positively associated with the trade-off between group outcome and individual contribution.
  2. This association is mediated by group members' attitudes towards collaboration.
  3. This association is also mediated by the extent to which members identity with their subgroups which in turn depends on subgroup size.

If I have time I will outline my plans for future research into adaptive CMC.

20 February
Rod Walsh: Experiences with HCI in Social Robotics

Slides (PowerPoint)

27 February
Alimran Nordin: Estimating Single Estimate Effect From Multiple Studies Using Meta-Analysis

My PhD focuses on investigating the relationship between immersion and time perception whilst playing digital games. A series of experiments have been conducted both manipulating immersion and time perception to test their effects on the other. The results however are inconsistent due to the sensitivity of immersion and time perception as cognitive processes. Further, the methodological dilemma to researching time perception adds to the complexity of gathering more evidence on the effect of immersion on time perception. Since the results gathered are not consistent, a meta-analysis study has been conducted on all experiments which have been done in the prospective paradigm to see what is the pattern on time perception (underestimate or overestimate) whilst playing digital games. In this seminar, I will discuss about the meta-analysis technique and the results I found from using it.

4 March
Sorachai Kamollimsakul: Web design guidelines for older people in Thailand and the UK

The population aged 60 years or over is increasing rapidly. This situation leads to an increasing number of older people who use the internet. However, older people may have limitations related to sensory, cognitive and physical problems. Many web design guidelines for older people have been proposed to improve the usability and accessibility of the web for this sector of the population but there is lack of evidence-based research to support such guidelines. Moreover, some recommendations from the different web design guideline vary. Most sets of guidelines have been developed in English and relate to the use of the Latin alphabet. Currently, there are no web design guidelines for the Thai language or for Thai older people. The objective of this research is to investigate the recommendations from web design guidelines for Thai and the UK older people, especially the recommendations related with text for reading web pages.

6 March
Tommy Yuan: Software for autistic children

Autism is one of the autism spectrum disorders (ASD) under the DSM-V classification. It is a lifelong disorder, characterised by delay and impairment of a person’s development, mainly centred on social interaction and communication disorders, as well as behaviour. People with autism often need support to develop communication skills and interact with other people. In this talk, I will walkthrough two strands of software development at York for such purpose. The first strand is the development of a story builder shell- a computer system designed to make it easy for parents and carers of young people with autism to write “stories” that might help the people in their care. And the second strand concerns the development of a software tool (You Talk!) to aid autistic children with communication shortfalls. User centred design was adopted in the development process which involves specialized teachers for autistic children from the local schools at York.

Tommy's slides (PDF)

13 March
Anna Cox: Should I Reply to this Email? Email Response Patterns as a Function of Inbox-level Cues

A common view of the email problem is that of email overload – a situation in which inboxes are full to overflowing, leaving the user feeling overwhelmed. Research has shown that rather than process their inbox in the order in which messages are received, people prioritise the order in which they deal with emails. Gmail priority inbox, VIP lists, etc all assume that people have too much email and that the triage process needs to be supported - that is, people need help quickly identifying the relevant email in their inbox to process. However, even after finding relevant email, we know that people sometimes choose to defer processing it. Previous research has made use of lab-based studies, ethnographies, diary studies and natural log analysis to shed light on the factors that influence how users prioritise emails for processing. However, each of these methods have limitations: lab studies are rather artificial; ethnographies and diary studies lack quantified measures and rely on participants having insight into their own behaviours; and whilst natural log analysis enables us to identify patterns they can be difficult to interpret. In this talk I will describe a series of in-the-wild experiments conducted in participants’ own inboxes that systematically investigate the factors that influence how people prioritise their emails for processing.


Motivated by the need for business-oriented tools, the standard data mining methodology CRISP-DM describes the process of data mining, but does not explain why the process has the form that it does. The 9 Laws of Data Mining list key characteristics of the process, and explain the reasons behind its form. Many of these laws and reasons are founded on cognition and concepts from Artificial Intelligence. Data mining can be seen as a key element in the cognition of organisations, in which it plays operational, strategic and transformational roles. Knowledge is at the heart of data mining, and the knowledge possessed by an organisation is the basis of its perception, thinking, action and learning.

Summer Term 2014

All seminars are at 13.30 on Thursdays in CSE/082 except where noted.

Date Speaker Room Title
(Links to abstract)
24 April Theo Georgiou CSE/082 Human Haptic Perception in Virtual Environments: An investigation of the interrelationship between physical stiffness and perceived roughness
1 May CSE/082
8 May Steve Kelly
University of Strathclyde
CSE/082 Novice drivers don't feel the risk: emotion as input to cognitive decision making processes?
15 May Nicolas Holliman
TFTV
CSE/082 Stereoscopic game design and evaluation
22 May Linda Little
Northumbia University
CSE/082 Changing behaviour online using different techniques: is it effective? (Postponed)
29 May CSE/082
5 June Beth Bell
York St John University
CSE/082 Making the Private Public: The Teenage Dark Art of Sharing Screenshots on Social Networking Sites
12 June Sam Simpson CSE/082 (TBA) (Postponed)
19 June Aliimran Nordin CSE/082 Immersion and players' time perception in digital games (Thesis seminar)

Abstracts

24 April
Theo Georgiou: Human Haptic Perception in Virtual Environments: An investigation of the interrelationship between physical stiffness and perceived roughness

Research in the area of haptics and how we perceive the sensations that come from haptic interaction started almost a century ago, yet there is little fundamental knowledge as to how and whether a change in the physical values of one characteristic can alter the perception of another. The increasing availability of haptic interaction through the development of force-feedback devices opened new possibilities in interaction. It allowed for accurate real time change of physical attributes on virtual objects in order to test the haptic perception changes to the human user. An experiment was carried out to ascertain whether a change in the stiffness value would have a noticeable effect on the perceived roughness of a virtual object. Participants were presented with a textured surface and were asked to estimate how rough it felt compared to a standard. What the participants did not know was that the simulated texture on both surfaces remained constant and the only physical attribute changing in every trial was the comparison object's surface stiffness. The results showed that there is a strong relationship between physical stiffness and perceived roughness that can be accurately described by a power function. The conclusion is that there are relationships between these parameters, but that further work is required to validate those relationships.A

8 May
Steve Kelly

Within the domain of decision making it is suggested that there are two distinct ways in which humans appraise risk: risk as feelings and risk as analysis. Meanwhile, current neurological theory, in the form of the Somatic Marker Hypothesis, supports the role of feelings and emotion as an evolved automated system of human risk appraisal that biases judgement and decision making. Using Skin Conductance Responses (SCR) to measure learner, novice and experienced drivers’ psycho-physiological responses to the development of driving hazards, it was found that experienced drivers were twice as likely to produce an SCR to developing hazards as novice drivers and three times as likely when compared with learner drivers. These differences maintained significance when age, gender and exposure were controlled for. Further analysis revealed that novice drivers who had less than 1,000 miles driving experience had anticipatory physiological responses similar to learner drivers, whereas novices who had driven more than 1,000 miles had scores approaching those of experienced drivers. This demonstrated a learning curve mediated by driving experience supporting experiential learning as proposed within the Somatic Marker Hypothesis. A differentiation between cognitive and psycho-physiological responses was also found supporting theory that distinguishes between conscious and non-conscious risk appraisal. These results demonstrate differential activation of emotion systems in drivers mediated by experience and may in part account for the excessive crash risk in young/inexperienced drivers. Further research requires demonstration of behavioural consequences of such learning but provides initial support for the consideration of graduated licensure and could potentially lead to emotional training of risk as well as standard perceptual training.

15 May
Nicolas Holliman: Stereoscopic game design and evaluation

The challenges of stereoscopic game design include how to algorithmically control the stereoscopic depth in the game to be comfortable at all times and how to use the stereoscopic depth cue effectively in the game. We focus here on the latter and begin by reviewing how several simple games we have designed and evaluated over the last ten years have performed in stereoscopic 3D.

We then describe our two most recent games designs, both intended to produce games that were unplayable on a standard 2D display. The first is the "Hoops" game where almost every depth cue was removed to produce a game that proved very difficult to play without stereoscopic 3D. The second is the "Interlopers" game which is a modified version of space invaders.

Overall we demonstrate that playing games in stereoscopic 3D can have substantial performance benefits for players while players also report enjoying the experience of stereoscopic 3D.

6 June
Beth Bell: Making the Private Public: The Teenage Dark Art of Sharing Screenshots on Social Networking Sites

Every day, teenagers contribute to the 500 million images shared on social networking sites, such as Facebook, Instagram and Tumblr. Drawing on exploratory qualitative research involving seventy-five teenagers, this presentation will focus on the practice of publicly sharing – via social networking sites – screenshots of privately intended digital communications (e.g. IM exchanges). Three key motivations were identified for sharing screenshots. However the practice itself was perceived as controversial, highlighting many of the broader issues that shape teen engagement with social media, including trust, ownership and control.

19 June
Immersion and players' time perception in digital games

Immersion is a commonly used term by players, designers and reviewers of digital games to describe the experience of playing digital games. It represents the cognitive sense of "being in the games". One of its consequences is players are losing track of time. However, little has been done to further investigate the effect of immersion on player's time perception whilst playing digital games. This thesis describes a series of experimental investigations to discover the relationship between immersion on player's time perception during a gaming session. The first part of the investigation was conducted by manipulating immersion to test its effect on time perception and the second part was done by manipulating time perception to test its effect on immersion. The results produced are rather inconsistent. Further analysis was conducted using meta-analysis suggesting that the effect on time perception was different from one experiment to another. The final qualitative study using grounded theory was conducted aims to understand how players perceive time whilst playing digital games. The theory suggests that players are aware of time but they give themselves a self-consent to ignore time whilst playing digital games. However, after gaming players realise the consent that they gave to ignore time causing them to spent huge amount of time playing. Hence, rather than blaming themselves they use the reason of losing track of time to justify why they spent a lot of time playing digital games.

In this seminar, I will be presenting a few studies from my thesis and will conclude the findings for my PhD.

Autumn Term 2014

Date Speaker Room Title
(Links to abstract)
2 October Matt Hudson CSE/082 Social Presence in Team-based Virtual Environments
9 October Linda Little
Northumbia University
CSE/082 Changing behaviour online using different techniques: is it effective?
16 October Helen Petrie,
Paul Cairns,
Chris Power,
Alistair Edwards
CSE/082 My Research and My Favourite Student Project
23 October Alistair Edwards CSE/082 Randomness and human behaviour: Part 42 of the trilogy
30 October Helen Petrie CSE/102-3 Have we forgotten more than we ever knew? Some reflections on the history of haptics
6 November Alice Bartlett
GDS
CSE/082 Burn your select tags (Video)
13 November Jo Lumsden,
Aston University
CSE/082 Inclusive Participatory Design: Guidelines for and Reflections on Involving Users with Disabilities in Design of Assistive Technologies
20 November Helen Petrie
Cagla Seneler & Chris Power
CSE/102-3 The effects of learning style on users' experience of two museum websites
27 November Paul van Schaik
Teesside University
CSE/082 Magnitude-based inference for user research
4 December CSE/082

Abstracts

2 October
Matt Hudson: Social Presence in Team-based Virtual Environments

This seminar documents the findings of an EngD which aimed to explore the nature of social presence in team-based virtual environments. The research focuses on team-based digital games, socially complex shared virtual environments in which users compete and cooperate towards a common goal. Social presence is a complex subjective notion that is highly dependant on the medium in which it is experienced. For this reason, rather than explore social presence in a general sense, this EngD aimed to focus on the concept within a specific context of digital games. Over the course of this EngD the core elements of social presence in these team-based virtual environments were isolated and used to develop a validated measure for the experience, specifically designed for these environments. The results highlight the effects of the context of play on social presence, including how performance, player familiarity, agency, and game type can change the social experience.

9 October
Linda Little: Changing behaviour online using different techniques: is it effective?

There exists a plethora of techniques currently used to change behaviour, for example, a review by Michie, Johnston, Francis, Hardeman and Eccles (2008) identified at least 137 individual techniques. The number and diversity of successful techniques highlights a 'one size fits all' approach cannot be adopted within behaviour change research. Two techniques used online with different populations are described in this presentation: (i) Self-affirmation - we explored if the technique could be used successfully online to increase participant's fruit and vegetable consumption. A purposeful sample was recruited (N85) consisting of university students (N59) and mothers from low SES (N26). Participants were randomly allocated to either the self-affirmed or non-affirmed (control) condition. Findings revealed a significant increase in fruit and vegetable consumption in the self-affirmed participants after a 7-day follow up; (ii) implementation/intentions- we investigated if this approach could be used successfully to increase participants energy saving behaviour. A purposeful sample (N240) teenagers participated in this study. Participants were randomly allocated to either the implementation/intention or control condition prior to completing an online questionnaire. Part of the questionnaire consisted of an online intervention based on implementation/intentions. Findings revealed participants in the implementation/intention group increased their energy saving behaviours significantly more in comparison to those in the control condition. The results from both studies demonstrate the need to selectively choose appropriate techniques based on the specific antecedents of the behaviour that is to be changed and the actual target population especially their ability to access, understand and process the behaviour change information.

Linda's slides (PowerPoint)

6 October
Helen Petrie, Paul Cairns, Chris Power, Alistair Edwards: My Research and My Favourite Student Project

Alistair's slides (PowerPoint)

23 October
Alistair Edwards: Randomness and human behaviour: Part 42 of the trilogy

Members of the group who have been around for a while will have heard me talk on this topic before. However, over time my ideas have changed and I would like to present some of my latest thoughts.

I pointed out previously that using randomness is often a way of making things appear more human. I therefore concluded that randomness was somehow an inherent trait. In fact, I have decided that is completely wrong; humans are very bad at coping with randomness.

I will give some examples and discuss pi.

6 November
Alice Bartlett: Burn your select tags

Alice is a graduate of this department, now working for the Government Digital Service (GDS). In this videoed talk (from EpicFel: Front End London) she illustrates some of the constraints that are imposed on government website design, some of which may appear to be in competition, including

  • Usability
  • Accessibility
  • Backwards compatibility (as far back as IE7)
  • Minimal JavaScript

All of these are achieved on the basis of user testing.

Links

13 November
Jo Lumsden: Inclusive Participatory Design: Guidelines for and Reflections on Involving Users with Disabilities in Design of Assistive Technologies

Mobile technology can play an important assistive role in helping to increase the standard of living (including wellbeing and associated health) for individuals with disabilities and other special needs. Furthermore, suggested healthcare reforms reflect the need for a future model of healthcare delivery wherein patients take more responsibility for their own healthcare in their own homes in an attempt to moderate healthcare costs without impairing healthcare quality. For such a paradigm shift to be realised, and for innovative assistive technologies to be effective, the supporting technologies must address the needs of individuals efficiently and effectively to ensure technology acceptance and use. We argue that, although at times extremely challenging, successful assistive technologies will not be possible without employing participatory approaches to their design. In this talk, using two case studies, I shall explore some of the challenges associated with including individuals with disabilities in the participatory design of IT-based assistive technologies to support their disabilities. I shall present a collated set of generalised guidelines for inclusive participatory design practice and reflect on their application within the case studies, the goals of which were to design mobile assistive technologies for very different disabilities. I shall conclude this talk with discussion of remaining challenges for participatory design approaches.

Jo's slides (PowerPoint) - including the case study that she did not have time to cover.

27 November
Paul van Schaik: Magnitude-based inference for user research

Magnitude-based inference offers a theoretically justified and practically useful approach to inference in any behavioural research that involves statistical data analysis. Because it explicitly supports inferences about both mechanistic importance (of, usually, cause and effect) and practical importance (for real-world decision-making), this approach is especially suitable for user research. We compare the existing practice of null-hypothesis significance-testing with magnitude-based inference and discuss the advantages of the latter. We also present examples of the application of magnitude-based inference to further illustrate its merits. Finally, we discuss other alternatives to null-hypothesis testing and limitations of magnitude-based inference, and give recommendations on how to use this type of inference in user research.

Paul's slides (PDF)

A paper (2015)  on this topic.


Spring Term 2015

Date Speaker Room Title
(Links to abstract)
15 January Leonardo Sandoval CSE/082 Citizen Centred e-Government: an HCI approach
22 January Gustav Kuhn
Goldsmiths University of London
CSE/082 The Science of Magic: Why magic works
29 January Alistair Edwards CSE/082 Dyslexia and programming
5 February Paul Cairns
Anna Bramwell-Dicks
Dave Swallow
CSE/082 The Cool Wall of technology
12 February CSE/082
19 February Jo Pugh CSE/082 The Joy of Instruments
26 February Ampleforth
Abbey
No seminar: Chinese New Year Celebration
5 March Linda Kaye
Edgehill University
CSE/082 Group flow: What is it and what does it tell us about social-based gaming?
12 March David Zendle CSE/082 The Effects of Graphical Fidelity on the Vividness of Violent Content in Video Games

Abstracts

15 January
Leonardo Sandoval: Citizen Centred e-Government: an HCI approach

Some of the main problems of e-government in OECD countries are the lack of adoption of services by citizens, and its low impact on public policy goals. A citizen-centred approach to e-government has been promoted by international organisations, governments and scholars as a way to address these problems. In practice, however, most of the citizen-centred initatives have been focusing on government-centred issues such as the integration and rationalisation of services, rather than focusing on user needs. Therefore it is sensible to ask how user-centred this citizen-centred approach is, and how may HCI contribute to it.

In this talk, I will briefly outline the main e-government definitions, classification systems and approaches. This review will illustrate how the citizen-centred approach is still permeated by government-centred concepts that pose a risk to e-government success. As a result of this literature review I will argue in favour of the use of an HCI approach for researching citizen-centredness. As highlighted by many researchers HCI has been largely ignored in the field of e-government research. However, many of its contributions on user-centredness could be used to investigate and improve the design of citizen-centred services (e.g. Usability evaluation methods, User Centred Design, Participatory and Inclusive Design, etc).

22 January
Gustav Kuhn: The Science of Magic: Why magic works

Magic is one of the oldest art forms, and for centuries conjurors have created illusions of the impossible by distorting your perception and thoughts. Advances in Psychology and Neuroscience offer new insights into why our minds are so easily deceived and I will explore some to the mechanisms that are involved in magic. Magic involves more than simple deception. Magic works because these psychological limitations are so counterintuitive that are more willing to accept a magical interpretation rather than acknowledge these limitations.

In this talk we will explore some of the principles used by magicians to distort your perception. For example, we will look at how magicians use misdirection to manipulate your attention and thereby prevent you from noticing things even though they might be right in front of your eyes. Alternatively, magicians may manipulate your expectations about the world and thus bias the way you perceive objects and can even make you see things that aren't necessarily there. At first sight, our proneness to being fooled by conjuring trick could be interpreted as a weakness of the human mind. However, contrary to this popular belief, I will demonstrate that these "errors" reveal the complexity of visual perception and highlight the ingenuity of the human mind.

Dr. Gustav Kuhn worked as a professional magician and it was his interest in deception and illusions that sparked a curiosity about the human mind. Gustav is a senior lecturer at Goldsmiths, University of London, and one of the leading researchers in the science of magic.

29 January
Alistair Edwards: Dyslexia and programming

Dylexia (or Specific Learning Difficulties) usually entails problems with the lexical and syntactical manipulation of language. This is well established with regard to natural languages (such as English). However, it is much less clear whether it affects people's computer programming abilities. On the one hand programming languages have a very strict syntax and lexical (spelling) errors can have major consequences, but on the other, there are software tools (compilers) which will check program code and support the programmer in correcting such errors.

Students who have dyslexia commonly are allowed 25% extra time when taking conventional, written examinations, but is this appropriate for exams that involve writing code? Might they need longer?

In this talk I will present the results of a project undertaken by Rui Zheng which investigated this. She created an on-line programming tool which enabled students (some of whom were dyslexic) to develop Java programs and with which we were able to see the lexical and syntactic corrections that they made during program development.

This was a small study, but its results do suggest that our current arrangements for students with dyslexia taking programming-based exams are not appropriate.

5 February
Paul Cairns, Anna Bramwell-Dicks, Dave Swallow: The Cool Wall of technology

The Cool Wall is an idea borrowed from BBC TV's Top Gear. In that case, the presenters rate different cars on a scale of Coolness (which is good) to un-cool. We will do the samem but for other technology.

The Top Gear Cool Wall

Come prepared by bringing your examples of what you consider to be cool - or uncool - technology. If you can, bring the item itself, if not, try to bring a picture of it or a URL linking to it. We have done this before, but this is your chance to contribute, bring the wall up to date, and hopefully reduce it's mean temperature by a few degrees. If you are short of ideas, try 25 cool gadgets you'll want to spend all those giftcards on.

Seriously
Un Cool
UN COOL COOL SUB
ZERO
       

19 February
Jo Pugh: The Joy of Instruments

In 2000 Michel Beaudouin-Lafon published the first (in English) of a series of papers on what he termed "instrumental interaction". Beaudoun-Lafon called on HCI researchers to live up to their names and design "interaction not interfaces" and criticised the continued reliance on WIMP-based software, developed in the 1970s and 1980s, when computing hardware had, in the interim, increased in leaps and bounds.

In this session we will consider the usefulness of interaction models generally and specifically Beaudouin-Lafon's ideas surrounding instrumental interaction. After we have untangled some of MBL's sometimes abstruse terminology, participants will work in groups to decompose and then suggest improvements to interfaces/domains of their choice using design principles such as reification and reuse. Finally we will come together to discuss the strengths and weaknesses of the approach and consider some wider implications for system design.

5 March
Linda Kaye: Group flow: What is it and what does it tell us about social-based gaming?

Digital gaming research has largely focused on the negative outcomes of the activity, and somewhat neglected the positive experiences and impacts. The current research critically considers the extent to which flow theory can underpin digital gaming experiences, and more importantly, its application to understanding socially-based gameplay. Within this, group flow will be introduced which will include insights into recent empirical findings as well as the practical implications for game design. In summary, these ideas and findings suggest developing the “group flow” framework for further theoretical and empirical understanding of the positive experiences and outcomes of digital gaming.

12 March
David Zendle: The Effects of Graphical Fidelity on the Vividness of Violent Content in Video Games

A large proportion of games can be described as representations of an imaginary series of events: Risk is theoretically about a global war, Shogi and Chess are supposedly about feuding noble families – and Battleships is (well) about battleships. However, whilst a game of chess might represent a blood-bath in theory, nobody expects to be traumatised by the violent massacre of their pawns. The idea that the game represents noble houses at war doesn't really matter that much to most players of the game.

Over the past decades, however, the role of video games as representations of imaginary events has become increasingly relevant to the academic community. Whether we're worried that playing Grand Theft Auto might lead to the observational learning of violent behaviours, or excited that children could learn about history by playing Civilisation, many researchers are now interested in the idea that games might function as representations – and that this function might have important consequences.

In this talk, I will cover some of the research that I have undertaken during my Ph.D. with Paul Cairns and Daniel Kudenko into whether, why, and how video games function as representations.

Summer Term 2015

Date Speaker Room Title
(Links to abstract)
30 April Ili Mahtar CSE/102-3 Investigating the use of technology to support people with dyslexia
7 May Helen Petrie
Dave Swallow
CSE/082 (TBA - but related to the Co-motion Project) (Postponed)
14 May Dave Swallow CSE/082 Co-Motion: Investigating the Links Between Mobility and Wellbeing Amongst Older People
21 May Joe Cutting CSE/102-3 Making a game for a museum
28 May David Zendle CSE/082 Using Unity
4 June Fionnuala Larkin,
Liz Meins
Department of Psychology
CSE/082 Using a smartphone app to improve parent-child interaction in mothers
11 June Panagiotis Koutsouras CSE/082 Creating Context: Understanding the Social Organisation of User-Generated Content in Digital Gameplay

Abstracts

30 April
Ili Mahtar: Investigating the use of technology to support people with dyslexia

Dyslexia is a reading disability that is characterized by difficulties of word recognition and decoding and poor spelling. It occurs throughout the world but with higher incidence in English speaking countries. There is some lack of agreement on exactly how dyslexia should be defined and whether people with dyslexia differ from other poor readers.

In this talk, I will discuss the definition of dyslexia and the controversy surrounding it, and the incidence of dyslexia in different populations. I will then present the five themes of research about dyslexia and technology that have emerged from my literature review: text presentation, navigation, guidelines, current assistive technologies for people with dyslexia, and their difficulties with computer software. A number of methodologies have been used in the research including measuring reading speed for texts and dyslexics' eye gaze patterns when reading and navigating websites.

It is clear that computer displays need to be adapted to meet the needs of dyslexic readers. However there is very little research that has empirically tested which text presentations are helpful or acceptable to this group of readers. In addition, some of the recommendations derived from the small corpus of research is confusing and unclear thus create confusion for developers trying to implement websites or other electronic environments suitable for dyslexic users.

14 May
Dave Swallow: Co-Motion: Investigating the Links Between Mobility and Wellbeing Amongst Older People

Older adults encounter numerous barriers to mobility, many of which are in the built environment. Technological solutions may enable them to mitigate these barriers and promote physical activity. To design appropriate technological solutions, it is crucial to understand the specific barriers to mobility older adults face from their perspectives. Photo diary studies allow older adults to autonomously document their experiences to support generation of user needs and requirements. We investigate the methodological appropriateness of photo diaries for exploring experiences of older adults and eliciting their requirements for new technologies. A photo diary study was conducted with 26 older adults, who were given disposable cameras to document things that affect their mobility. As well as presenting a selection of the mobility barriers identified in this study, this presentation outlines a number of methodological issues relating to the use of photo diaries for eliciting the needs and requirements of older adults.

21 May
Joe Cutting: Making a game for a museum

Before starting my PhD I spent fifteen years creating digital exhibits for museums. I started working for the Science Museum in London, before branching out and setting up my own company. In this talk I'll be discussing how I created a game for the William Morris museum in Walthamstow. I’ll be going through the whole process from initial briefing to final software. Along the way I’ll be describing some of the techniques used to design a game which communicates museum content and is also fun to play.

4 June
Fionnuala Larkin, Liz Meins: Using a smartphone app to improve parent-child interaction in mothers

Baby+Me is a small-scale intervention study that aims to use new technology to improve the quality of infant–mother interaction in teenage mothers. In Baby+Me, an intervention will be delivered via smartphone app, used over a period of 6 months. A randomized controlled trial design will be used to compare this intervention to a pre-existing app focused on child development. Participants will be identified through midwives at York hospitals, health visitors in children's centres and GP surgeries. The study will recruit 140 mothers and randomly assign them to the postnatal intervention or control group. The first testing phase will be when infants are aged 6 months and the second when the infants are 12 months. The study will recruit an additional 70 mothers antenatally, who will all receive the intervention and will be interviewed in the last trimester of pregnancy, and followed up when their infants are 6 months of age. Outcomes for maternal mind-mindedness, mental health and infant-mother attachment security will be evaluated. The project is a Portfolio study with CRN support (ID: 16561) and has been approved by NHS and University of York Ethics Committees.

11 June
Panagiotis Koutsouras: Creating Context- Understanding the Social Organisation of User-Generated Content in Digital Gameplay

This project focuses on the practices that revolve around the creation and the subsequent sharing of content in gaming communities. Even though there are many different types of User-Generated Content (UGC) in the gaming industry, we place our interest on games and gaming platforms (like Minecraft and Steam, respectively) that provide the affordances of intrinsically managing the aforementioned practices. By taking Steam's workshop and the popular game Minecraft as our use cases, we want to understand the social organisation of these environments and to map their structure and the social interactions that are involved in them. Our methodological approach is ethnomethodologically-informed ethnography, focusing on the exploration of the collective practices that are manifested inside these communities. As a result of that, we will elucidate the values that prevail in the economies that are developed and sustained through the practices that are taking place inside them and on how the players' identity is expressed through the created content.

Autumn Term 2015

Date Speaker Room Title
(Links to abstract)
1 October Alena Denisova CSE/082 The Placebo Effect in Digital Games: Phantom Perception of Adaptive Artificial Intelligence
Adaptation in Digital Games: The Effect of Challenge Adjustment on Player Performance and Experience
8 October Helen Petrie, Paul Cairns,
Chris Power & Alistair Edwards
CSE/082 My research and my favourite student project
9 October Elisa Mekler CSE/082 Exploring the Player Experience over Several Gaming Sessions
Sharon Steinemann How Games Can Encourage Prosocial Behavior and Attitude Change
15 October Effie Law
Leicester University
CSE/082 Game-based research and gamified research: Where is the dividing line?
22 October Andreas Savva CSE/082 Comparing Concurrent and Retrospective Verbal Protocols for Blind and Sighted Users
Alistair Edwards Exploring Map Orientation with Interactive Audio-Tactile Maps
29 October Simon Attfield
Middlesex University
CSE/082 Intelligence analysis, distributed cognition and visualisation: A tale of two projects
5 November Tanja Walsh CSE/082 Online Surveys in Collecting Cross-Cultural Qualitative UX Feedback on Technology Products and Services
12 November Olly Farshi
Google
CSE/082 (TBA, but something related to usability in the wild)
Sorry - postponed
19 November Laurence Payot CSE/082 Virtual Symbiosis
26 November Simone Stumpf
City University
CSE/082 The role of explanations in interacting with intelligent machines
3 December Helen Petrie & Kenny Mathew CSE/082 Development and evaluation of an app to motivate people to increase their consumption of fruit and vegetables

Abstracts

1 October
Alena Denisova

The format is slightly different this week. Alena will be giving presentations at the CHI Play Conference - and we get to have exclusive previews of her talks.

The Placebo Effect in Digital Games: Phantom Perception of Adaptive Artificial Intelligence

Play-testing of digital games is a crucial part of any game development process, used to gather feedback about the game and correct any existing and potential flaws with the design. However, due to the nature of human subject testing, the feedback being collected in such experiments is prone to biases. Players’ expectations play a great role in dictating their gaming experience, which means the information players receive before trying a new game, as well as the knowledge they already possess, may affect their perception and experience of the game. Two studies were conducted in order to evaluate how priming players to expect improved technology can positively influence their experience. The results supported the hypothesis that even basic instructions can change players’ perception of the game, and lead to a higher level of perceived immersion when knowing that the game contains an improved feature, the adaptive artificial intelligence (AI), while it is not present in the game.

Adaptation in Digital Games: The Effect of Challenge Adjustment on Player Performance and Experience

Good gaming experiences hinge on players being able to have a balance between challenge and skill. However, achieving that balance is challenging, so dynamic difficulty adjustment offers the opportunity to provide better gaming experiences through adapting the challenge in the game to suit an individual’s capabilities. The risk though is that in adapting the difficulty, players do not get a true sense of challenge, but rather some tailored, perhaps watered down experience. In this note, we report on a study, in which we used time manipulation as a method of simple adaptation in order to explore its effect on player experience (PX) and performance. Volunteers played a game in which the timer was adjusted based on their performance in the game, however they were not aware of the feature. The results showed that players in the experimental group found the game more immersive. This provides empirical support that dynamic difficulty adjustment could be used to improve the PX.

8 October
Helen Petrie, Paul Cairns, Chris Power & Alistair Edwards: My research and my favourite student project

This is mainly a chance for new members of the Group to find out about the research of the established members. We will outline our research interests in general and talk about one (or more) of the related student projects that we have supervised. This will give new students a chance to start thinking about the kind of project they might like to undertake.

9 October
Elisa Mekler: Exploring the Player Experience over Several Gaming Sessions

Players often invest numerous hours into a single game, but there is still little research on how the player experience affects whether we revisit or abandon a game after playing. As part of a course I taught on the psychology of digital games, I conducted a study to explore how 25 players experienced the puzzle platformer FEZ over several gaming sessions. Players were free to choose when they played, but following each 30 - 60 minute gaming session, they were asked to describe their game experience in an open-end format, and rate their intrinsic motivation, as well as need satisfaction. In my talk I will present some findings, as well as discuss the challenges I encountered when analysing and interpreting the data.

Sharon Steinemann: How Games Can Encourage Prosocial Behavior and Attitude Change

Previous research has proposed different factors by which games for change may impact prosocial behavior. However, research that empirically examines these theorized relationships has so far been sparse. In my previous research in the context of my master thesis we experimentally manipulated two game factors (interactivity and presentation mode) to investigate their effect on participants’ willingness to donate a percentage of a bonus they received for participating in our study. We found a significant effect for interactivity, while presentation mode seemed to have very little effect on donating behavior. Additionally, we found that the relationship between interactivity and increased donating was mediated by appreciation for the game, indicating that interactivity may increase the meaningfulness of media, which then in turn prompts a higher behavioral prosocial involvement. In this short talk I will discuss the implications of these findings and give a brief overview of how I plan to build on this research in my PhD studies. The hope is that this research will contribute to a better understanding of how games can not only entertain, but also increase awareness of social injustice, decrease stigmatization of disadvantaged groups, and encourage prosocial behavior in the people who interact with them.

I will conclude the talk with an open discussion where I warmly welcome feedback and thoughts from the audience. I look forward to an interesting discourse!

15 October
Effie Law - Game-based research and gamified research: Where is the dividing line?

Gamification has become a buzzword in the recent years. Everything seems gamifiable, including, of course, learning. In contrast, game-based learning has existed for decades. If it is narrowed down to digital educational games (DEGs), then arguably game-based learning has become popular since the turn of millennium. In this talk, I will present two cases of DEGs: One is aimed at teaching primary school pupils the concept of food groups, and another one is aimed at teaching university students the programming concept of array. As a comparison, I will present another game, which is primarily not designed for learning, but for collecting empirical data on how young children understand the Law in their everyday lives. Nonetheless, incidental learning may still take place. Based on the three cases, I will discuss the issue about the dividing line between game-based research and gamified research. My current stance on this issue is that the line is so blurred that there is probably no clear distinction between them.

22 October
Andreas Savva: Comparing Concurrent and Retrospective Verbal Protocols for Blind and Sighted Users

Verbal protocols are widely used in user studies for evaluating websites. This study investigated the effectiveness and efficiency of concurrent and retrospective verbal protocols (CVP and RVP) for both blind and sighted participants, as well as participant workload and attitudes towards these meth- ods. Eight blind and eight sighted participants undertook both protocols in a website evaluation. RVP was more effective as measured by problems encountered for both groups, although it was no more efficient than CVP. The severity of problems identified by both protocols was equivalent. As measured on the NASA TLX, participants found RVP found more demanding than CVP. Sighted participants found rating problems during CVP more disruptive than blind participants. These results show that RVP is a more useful protocol for practitioners and researchers even though it takes more time and is more demanding for participants. It is equally applicable for both blind and sighted participants.

Alistair Edwards: Exploring Map Orientation with Interactive Audio-Tactile Maps

Multi-modal interactive maps can provide a useful aid to navigation for blind people. We have been experimenting with such maps that present information in a tactile and auditory (speech) form, but with the novel feature that the map’s orientation is tracked. This means that the map can be explored in a more ego-centric manner, as favoured by blind people. Results are encouraging, in that scores in an orientation task are better with the use of map rotation.

29 October
Simon Attfield: Intelligence analysis, distributed cognition and visualisation: A tale of two projects

In this talk I plan to start with a fairly quick overview of a number of projects I am involved in the area of sensemaking and visualisation. Domains include military intelligence, police investigation, e-discovery and university management. Theoretical perspectives we are using include distributed cognition, narrative theory and argumentation theory. I will then describe one piece of work in more detail. This takes distributed cognition as a basis for studying military signals intelligence analysts and for re-engineering their work environment using visualisation with the aim of reducing cognitive load. Part of this work, which I am doing with Ashley Wheat, seeks to establish a more general framework for analysing the use of representations during sensemaking.

Biography

Simon Attfield is Associate Professor of Human Centred Technology in the Interaction Design Centre at Middlesex University. His research involves understanding how people think about and work with information, the processes involved in individual and collaborative sensemaking and implications for interactive, visual systems design. He is currently leading and co-leading projects in which cognitive task analyses are being used to inform the design of interactive visual systems in intelligence settings. He has conducted user-research in numerous domains including intelligence, national news, corporate law and healthcare. With Ann Blandford he is co-author of the book Interacting with Information, part of the Morgan Claypool series of Synthesis Lectures on Human-Centered Informatics. He received a B.A. in Philosophy and a BSc. in Experimental Psychology from Sussex University, and a PhD in Human Computer Interaction from University College London.

5 November
Tanja Walsh: Online Surveys in Collecting Cross-Cultural Qualitative UX Feedback on Technology Products and Service

Globalisation of markets means that many interactive products and services need to be usable and provide a positive User Experience (UX) to people in many different target market areas. Simultaneously, over the last decade, positive UX has become an important quality attribute and a business-critical asset in the design of interactive technology products and services. Technology is always contextualised in a local culture that directs the way in which people interpret and use products and services. Culture itself is a complex concept affecting a vast area of human life and interaction. Consequently, designers are facing challenges in creating a delightful UX for an increasing number of users from different cultural backgrounds. Thus, there is a need to understand how local cultures may affect the use of and interaction with technology to ensure that products and services are easy to use and that they provide a good UX across cultural boundaries. Cross-cultural issues affect not only the technology products and services UX but also that of research methods.

Remote online methods are needed in global UX research, and they are considered practical, and have extensive and wide scale samples suited to cross-cultural UX research. My presentation is an overview of my Phd “Online Surveys in Collecting Cross-Cultural Qualitative User Experience Feedback”. I aim to understand how an online survey fits into a cross-cultural UX study in terms of eliciting qualitative data. As the goal of my study is to understand online UX surveys and users in different local cultures I aim to gain knowledge about what kind of cultural issues affect these surveys and how they should be taken into consideration when looking at human-centred design. I focus on studying how textual and visual elements can be used in cross-cultural online UX surveys and then reflect on the practical implications of the results in a cross-cultural online UX survey process. The research has a multiple case study research approach and most of the case studies were executed in a real product development context with an emphasis on the qualitative research.

19 November
Laurence Payot: Virtual Symbiosis

Computer generated sketch to illustrate Virtual Symbiosis

Laurence Payot has been selected as one of the C2D2 artists in residence at the University of York, working with the Departments of Biology, Computer Science, TFTV and Music to create “Virtual Symbiosis”, a interactive game linking people in different geographical locations through an interactive virtual sculpture.

Laurence will present her ideas for this new work and is looking for students to would be interested to work with her on various aspects of the project:

  • Computer Science students to develop the concept of this game.
  • TFTV or Art students to document the process via film and/or photography.
  • Students who would be interested in assisting with some of the workshops to create the sculptures (physically), or during public events such as the Festival of Ideas.

If you're interested in the project but cannot come to the talk, please contact Laurencepayot@yahoo.co.uk. www.laurencepayot.com

More about the project

Laurence Payot will create a beautifully crafted computer game inspired by symbiosis, the living together of unlike organisms, which underpins our health particularly through the beneficial effects of the microbiome. This project builds on a previous collaboration with Prof.Michael Brockhurst which created a series of living sculptures which existed in a symbiosis with the audience members.

In the game, two players situated in different geographical locations will be able to connect by transforming the shape of interactive virtual sculptures, as if touching them in real life. Interactive sound and visuals will help achieve this feeling of virtual touch, using either body tracking and sculptures displayed on screen, or augmented reality glasses.

As well as exploring the concept of symbiosis, this new work will explore humanity’s increasing symbiosis with technology and the implications of this for our psychology and wellbeing,drawing upon the expertise of Prof. Helen Petrie in human-computer interaction and members of the Centre for Digital Creativity.

Interactive sound, manipulated by the game players as they shape the virtual sculptures, will be developed in collaboration with Dr. Sandra Pauletto and Prof.Ambrose Field, using human voices to give the sculptures an extra layer, and make the game accessible to people with visual disabilities.

26 November
Simone Stumpf: The role of explanations in interacting with intelligent machines

Machines that help users make decisions or recommend taking an action are now becoming part of the mainstream. However, many systems such as these are still “black boxes" without adequately disclosing how they work to users. This can have detrimental effects on the user’s ability to assess when system suggestions or recommendations are correct and to steer the system in the right direction if things go wrong. This talk will provide an overview on work in “explanatory debugging” of machine learning systems and the effects of explanations on interacting with Intelligent assistants.

Biography

Simone Stumpf received a PhD in Computer Science in 2001 and a BSc in Computer Science with Cognitive Science in 1996, both from University College London. She is currently a Senior Lecturer at City University London, Centre for HCI Design. Previously, she conducted research at Oregon State University, USA, and University College London, UK. Her research centres on end-user interactions with intelligent systems, end-user development and personal information management. She is a member of the End Users Shaping Effective Software (EUSES) consortium, an international collaboration to develop and investigate technologies that support end-users to directly influence software behaviour. Dr Stumpf also has industrial experience as a User Experience Architect.

Slides (PDF)

3 December
Helen Petrie and Kenny Mathew: Development and evaluation of an app to motivate people to increase their consumption of fruit and vegetables

Most people do not eat enough fruit and vegetables, with many detrimental health consequences. We have developed an app to help people monitor their fruit and vegetable consumption which includes a range of different mechanisms to motivate them to consume healthy amounts of fruit and vegetables. We conducted a two week field trial with 32 people of the app, evaluating its usability and the perceived effectiveness of the different motivators. Overall, goal-setting was perceived to be the most effective motivator. Our talk will present the app and the results of the field trial, as well as thoughts for further work on this topic.


Spring Term 2016

Date Speaker Room Title
(Links to abstract)
14 January Alistair Edwards CSE/082 Clickbait
21 January Maneerut Chatrangsan CSE/082 Tablet computers for older people
28 January Fernando Loizides
University of Wolverhampton
CSE/082 Investigating Patent Examination Using Eye-tracking
4 February
16.00
Oliver Blank
Google
CSE/266-7 Fuzzy Logic - Designing Things In The Wild
11 February Florian Block CSE/082 Big Data, Playful Learning and Interaction Design
18 February G. Anthony Giannoumis
Oslo and Akershus University College
(Hosted by Helen)
CSE/082 Achieving Universal Access through ICT Accessibility Policy
25 February Helen Petrie
Paul Cairns
Chris Power
David Zendle
CSE/082 Project selection for HCIT and SMIT students
3 March Amelia Jupit CSE/082 Identity formation of players through meaningful choices in digital games
10 March Sebastian Deterding
(Hosted by Paul)
CSE/082 (Postponed) The Lens of Intrinsic Skill Atoms: A Method for Gameful Design
24 March Burak Merdenyan CSE/203 Users' password behaviour and a psychological approach to understanding password behaviour

Abstracts

14 January
Alistair Edwards: Clickbait

Websites would be pointless unless people visit them and many sites rely on advertising to be financially viable. 'Clickbait' refers to web content which is intended to attract visitors to a site in the hope that while there the visitor will be drawn to the advertising thereon.

That clickbait works would seem evident, from the number of sites which serve it up, yet there is very little literature on the techniques that are used. Probably they are something of a dark art, protected by those who would exploit it.

Nevertheless, it seems worthy of examining the phenomenon and the techniques which appear to be in use.

Slides (PowerPoint)

21 January
Maneerut Chatrangsan: Tablet computers for older people

The use of tablet computers has rapidly spreading because they are portable, easy to use and fast. In addition, tablet computers are thought to be an ideal tool for older people, helping them to use and communicate via the Internet and hence enhance their everyday lives. However, there are some problems for older people to use tablet computers such as the size of the text and labelling on controls and confusions about how to interact with a touch-screen. Moreover, older people often have vision and hearing impairments so aspects such as text presentation need to be adapted to be appropriate for this user group. In this talk, I will report on my findings of a literature review about the attitudes of older people to tablet computers, their use of tablet computer and recommendations for text presentation on both computer and tablet computer screens in different languages. It will be seen that the recommendations for text presentation on tablet computers are still not clear. Moreover, there are no studies looking at the effect of text presentation on tablet computers for older people. Therefore, my research aims to investigate the effect of text presentation on readability of tablet computers for older people in both English and Thai.

28 January
Fernando Loizides: Investigating Patent Examination Using Eye-tracking

Searching for information in the digital domain can be a daunting task. The problems faced by information seekers have evolved through the years due to digitisation and communication technology advancements. We no longer have the problem of locating enough information, but suffer from the opposite problem of information overload; namely, having too much information to have to go through. One domain which requires particular attention to the way information seekers triage documents is that of patent searching in which successful triage is task and business critical. We read daily of the billions of pounds in law suits between large companies due to patent infringement. So the questions arise: What is going on? How do these patents come to be? In this talk we will investigate to a high level of granularity, how patent applications are examined to reveal some interesting, albeit worrying, findings.

4 February
Oliver Blank: Fuzzy Logic - Designing Things In The Wild

This talk is about what it means to do good design in chaotic scenarios. Scenarios such as creating a service for tens of millions of users across Indonesia via a tiny office space in Helsinki. Or helping a French medic communicate with an Afghani migrant in a Greek refugee camp. Through this talk we'll establish a set of practices for tackling ambiguity and identify techniques that allow us to make use of the resources around us.

Biography of the speaker

Oliver Blank is an English artist, designer, and composer. His artwork brings a sense of wonder to our public spaces, and his design projects focus on the prevention of suffering.

Oliver is a Senior Designer at Google. He was previously a Principal Designer at Nokia where he worked on a family of connected hardware products designed to inspire people to head outdoors and go on adventures. Prior to Nokia, Oliver was a partner at New Orleans-based Civic Center, a design studio that made cities more comfortable for people.

Oliver's music and installations have featured at exhibitions and festivals around the world including London's Design Museum, Victoria & Albert Museum, Tate Gallery, and Helsinki’s Taidehalli. He currently resides in San Francisco but variously calls Helsinki, London, Manchester, and New Orleans home.

11 February
Florian Block: Big Data, Playful Learning and Interaction Design

While large datasets have been most relevant to experts and researchers at the cutting edge of science, we also begin to recognize the potential of big data to engage the general public in scientific discovery and learning. In this talk, I will present the DeepTree museum exhibit, an interactive visualization of over 70,000 species and their shared evolutionary history, which has been on display in four natural history museums across the US. On a large multi-touch tabletop display, groups of visitors can browse the vast biodiversity we see today, learn about the relatedness of all species, and explore traits that different species share. The talk will focus on the novel visualization techniques used to make the large tree of life dataset accessible to a lay audience, as well as the pivotal role of interaction design to facilitate collaborative engagement around interactive tabletops. I will demonstrate that large datasets can entice and emotionally engage a wide spectrum of learners, foster self-directed exploration and learning, and provide open-ended experiences that inherently adapt to the users level of understanding.

18 February
G. Anthony Giannoumis: Achieving Universal Access through ICT Accessibility Policy

The United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities recognizes accessibility to information and communication technologies (ICT) as essential for full participation in the information society. This presentation introduces recent findings of a comparative case study of web accessibility policy implementation in the United States, United Kingdom, and Norway. The research on which this presentation is based examines how national and supranational policies for promoting ICT Accessibility are implemented in practice. The results demonstrate how different approaches to ensuring and enhancing economic opportunities for private enterprises and social opportunities for persons with disabilities have been influenced by national policy traditions, the distribution of roles, and the relationships between actors participating in the design and implementation of ICT accessibility policy. Future research must continue to empirically examine the mediators to effective policy implementation from within a system of multi-level governance.


Summer Term 2016

Date Speaker Room Title
(Links to abstract)
28 April Rob van Roy
KU Leuven
LMB/036X
(Note change of location)
Towards theory-driven gamification design: an explorative study
5 May Ivan Flechais
Oxford University
CSE/082 Home, Family, and Household Data Security: Towards Understanding and Securing "the Home User"
12 May Ali Gheitasy
University of West London
CSE/082 Socio-technical gaps & social capital formation in Online Collaborative Consumption (OCC) communities
19 May Sebastian Deterding CSE/082 The Lens of Intrinsic Skill Atoms: A Method for Gameful Design
26 May David Sloan
Paciello Group
CSE/082 Tales from the accessibility frontier
2 June Jo Pugh CSE/082 Are you smarter than a Twitter bot?

Abstracts

28 April
Rob van Roy: Towards theory-driven gamification design: an explorative study

Gamification is a design technique that implements game design elements in non-game contexts (Deterding et al., 2011) in order to motivate people. In recent years, the popularity of this technique boomed with systems in a wide range of different contexts that are being gamified. However, when reviewing these implementations, it becomes clear that a majority of these systems are being designed while neglecting the underlying psychological processes of human motivation. In this talk, Rob will propose Self-Determination Theory (Deci & Ryan, 2004) as a theoretical perspective that can aid in designing gamification. Furthermore, he will share some interesting results from an explorative study investigating the potential of using SDT to design a gamified system in an educational context.

5 May
Ivan Flechais: Home, Family, and Household Data Security: Towards Understanding and Securing "the Home User"

Data security continues to be a topic of newsworthy interest: incidents affecting personal information services and assets are regular news items, and security awareness is the most commonly proffered solution to the widely perceived problem of inadequate security in the home. Set against a backdrop of government-backed efforts to improve security, increases in spending on organisational IT security, and a greater emphasis on compliance and data protection, we explore the curious case of securing "the home user". Despite a real, and growing, series of existing and foreseeable threats targeting "the home user", research thus far has only scratched the surface of the breadth and depth of the problem domain -- not least of which by tacitly proposing that home users are broadly defined as "not professionals in computing". In this talk, we discuss different conceptualisations of homes, families, and households, and argue that such constructs are a natural starting point for any serious efforts at improving the security posture of "the home user". We discuss the problems associated with securing such a heterogeneous and nebulous context of use, and debunk the myth that raising awareness and educating people towards making better security decisions is in any way a solution. We argue that securing data in non-work settings needs to start from an understanding of the complex social, cultural, and moral dimensions of today's homes, families, and households, and not from a priori assumptions about the inadequacies, limitations, and irresponsibility of "the home user".

12 May
Ali Gheitasy: Socio-technical gaps & social capital formation in Online Collaborative Consumption (OCC) communities

This PhD research investigates the socio-technical gaps in the social activities of online collaborative consumption (OCC) to improve the user experience and interaction design requirements. OCC activities are computer-mediated interactions among people that facilitate sharing, swapping, trading, or renting products, services and resources. Etsy is the focus of this study, due to its features as an online marketplace and community where OCC takes place. This research also studies the formation of social capital in online communities by learning users’ motivations, behaviours, benefits and difficulties to reveal collaboration patterns and social requirements. A new combined methodological framework, “predictive ethnography” is proposed in this research. In this framework, online ethnography complements predictive evaluation with the aid of heuristics that serve as metrics to investigate the gaps in the online communities of Etsy.

19 May
Sebastian Deterding: The Lens of Intrinsic Skill Atoms: A Method for Gameful Design

The idea that game design can inspire the design of motivating, enjoyable interactive systems has a long history in human-computer interaction. It currently experiences a renaissance as gameful design, often implemented through gamification, the use of game design elements in nongame contexts. Yet there is little research-based guidance on designing gameful systems. This talk reviews existing methods and identifies challenges and requirements for gameful design. It introduces a gameful design method that uses skill atoms and design lenses to identify challenges inherent in a user's goal pursuit and restructure them to afford gameplay-characteristic motivating, enjoyable experiences.

26 May
David Sloan: Tales from the accessibility frontier

What are the key real-world issues we face when supporting organisations in creating accessible online experiences?

In this talk, I'll present a perspective on accessibility of someone who moved from academia to industry; a move from teaching and researching accessibility in higher education to working with organisations in industry, education, and government to provide strategic and tactical support on how to provide better digital experiences for disabled people. I’ll look at the context of our engagements with clients, recurring challenges that we encounter, and our efforts to shift thinking from accessibility as a compliance exercise towards an essential quality of a good user experience.

I'll also consider the role of education'what core knowledge and skills do we need to develop amongst digital decision-makers of the future, so that we don’t experience the same problems over again? I’ll discuss the Teach Access project as an interesting example of how the tech industry and accessibility advocacy can work with Higher Education to rethink how accessibility is taught.

Speaker's biography

David Sloan is UX Research Lead with The Paciello Group (TPG), a specialist digital accessibility consultancy. Previously, he spent nearly 14 years as a researcher and teacher in the University of Dundee’s School of Computing, and completed a PhD in 2006 titled: The Effectiveness of the Web Accessibility Audit as a Motivational and Educational Tool in Inclusive Web Design. He maintains his links to accessibility research and teaching as a member of the steering group of the W4A Web For All Conference, and is co-chair of the W3C Accessible Online Learning Community Group.

2 June
Jo Pugh: Are you smarter than a Twitter bot?

Most of us do not think of ourselves as interacting with robots in our daily lives but on the internet we encounter bots all the time. They crawl websites and write Wikipedia articles, less friendly bots spam us or manipulate online rankings. Twitter forms a rare bot ecosystem in which humans and bots interact directly and indirectly with each other. In this talk I will discuss a range of Twitter bots and look for the common behaviours they exhibit and the behaviours they provoke in humans. I will also discuss emerging codes of ethics amongst bot makers and explore what happens when chatbots go rogue.

Autumn Term 2016

Date Speaker Room Title
(Links to abstract)
6 October Helen Petrie, Paul Cairns, Chris Power & David Zendle CSE/082 My research and my favourite student project
13 October Helen Petrie CSE/082 Technology in the kitchen: cooking with recipes from a tablet computer
20 October Burak Merdenyan CSE/082 Cultural and Gender Differences in Password Behaviors: Evidence from China, Turkey and the UK
27 October   CSE/082  
3 November Simon Harper
University of Manchester
CSE/082 Understanding Behaviour using Smart Phones
10 November   CSE/082  
17 November Stefan Carmien CSE/082 Intelligence augmentation for cognitive orthotics
24 November Alistair Edwards CSE/082 Can blind people do mathematics?
1 December Dave Swallow CSE/082
CSE/102-3
Understanding and Supporting Web Developers: Working Practices and Resources for the Creation and Evaluation of Accessible Websites

Abstracts

6 October
Helen Petrie, Paul Cairns, Chris Power & David Zendle: My research and my favourite student project

This is mainly a chance for new members of the Group to find out about the research of the established members. We will outline our research interests in general and talk about one (or more) of the related student projects that we have supervised. This will give new students a chance to start thinking about the kind of project they might like to undertake.

20 October
Burak Merdenyan: Cultural and Gender Differences in Password Behaviors: Evidence from China, Turkey and the UK

A survey investigated the password behaviors of a sample of 202 men and women from three countries with very different cultures: China, Turkey and the UK. The survey covered four areas: the context of password use, password creation, password management and attitudes to passwords. A complex pattern of country and gender differences emerged, with most country differences in the context of password use and password creation behaviors, and gender differences in context of password use, password creation and management behaviors. There was little support for three hypotheses concerning cultural differences in password behaviors derived from the dimensions of Power Distance, Individualism-Collectivism, and Uncertainty Avoidance. However, the results suggest that both cultural background and gender need to be taken into account when studying users' password behaviors.

3 November
Simon Harper: Understanding Behaviour using Smart Phones

Commercial Smart Phones - and the array of sensors included with them - make unobtrusive sensing a very real possibility. By sensing a userin the wild, longitudinally, and in an ecologically valid way, we can infer behaviour from a set of pre-defined proxy indicators. Here I'll discuss our work in using mobile phones to track Parkinson's disease progression, for understanding building wellbeing and energy consumption, and for understanding the health of Bee hives. I'll also explain where we will go in the future, and how our methods can help your work.

17 November
Stefan Carmien: Intelligence augmentation for cognitive orthotics

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is often used in computing systems to help people achieve tasks they could not reasonably do by themselves. For example, an automobile GPS system calculates the best route (which is not always the shortest). Another example is credit card issuers determining with your purchasing history that that the card was stolen. In some cases, like launching a rocket, this is entirely appropriate; in others, like supporting people with intellectual disabilities, not so much. This is the subject of the talk, for reasons I will discuss.

The intelligence augmentation (IA) approach provides a framework that leverages users existing abilities to solve problems. This is the difference between prosthetics and orthotics. Why the long words? The lecture will make sense of why to use them, and how it changes your design practice.

After an introduction and presentation of my previous work. I will introduce the concept of bandwidth of need and use, a way of evaluating if what you propose to do is appropriate. I will briefly present IA approaches of designing with IA. These include Distributed Cognition, Scaffolding, and the 'Tools for living / Tools for learning' framework. If there is time, I will present several exemplary IA systems.

Stefan's slides (PDF)

24 November
Alistair Edwards: Can blind people do mathematics?

Very few blind people even get as far as studying mathematics to A-Level. Why is this? Is it because mathematics relies on visual notations and representations, or is there something inherently difficult for blind students?

Having been involved in a number of projects on making mathematics more accessible (including MathTalk, MATHS and Lambda) my view on this has changed over time. Most recently, though, a paper has been published reporting work involving scanning the brains of blind and sighted mathematicians shedding new light on this.

1 December
Dave Swallow: Understanding and Supporting Web Developers: Working Practices and Resources for the Creation and Evaluation of Accessible Websites

Web developers have an obligation to develop websites that are accessible and usable by the broadest range of users, including people with disabilities. For almost as long as the Web has existed, there have been various initiatives to support, encourage and compel web developers to fulfil this obligation. Despite these well-intentioned initiatives and the wide availability of accessibility information, web developers still struggle to create accessible websites. Evidence from a substantial number of web accessibility evaluation studies over the last two decades indicates that the accessibility of websites has barely improved during this period and, according to certain studies, has worsened.

This PhD research examines web developers’ existing knowledge and working practices to understand why they are failing to create accessible websites and what can be done to better support them. It describes the design, implementation and evaluation of a new accessibility information resource, called WebAIR (Web Accessibility Information Resource), for supporting web developers in the creation and evaluation of accessible websites.

Spring Term 2017

Date Speaker Room Title
(Links to abstract)
12 January Anna Bramwell-Dicks CSE/082 Music while you work: The effect of music on transcription typing performance and experience
19 January Yannis Darzentas
(Visiting Leverhume professor)
CSE/082 Systems Thinking in HCI and Design
Monday 23January Judy Edworthy
Plymouth University
RCH/Lakehouse Alarm design and implementation in complex and safety-critical domains
2 February Nervo Verdezoto
University of Leicester
CSE/082 Understanding and Designing Technology to Fit People’s Everyday Practices: Challenges and Opportunities in Healthcare and Sustainability
9 February Alistair Edwards CSE/082 Clickbait – post-truth?
16 February Sally Quinn
(Department of Psychology)
CSE/082 Do facial judgments predict the re-tweeting of images of missing and wanted people on Twitter?
23 February Sam Simpson CSE/082 Postponed to 20 April
How do experienced mindfulness practitioners develop a mindful life and what does this tell us about playing computer games mindfully?
Friday 3 March 11.30-12.30 Stuart Lawler
National Council of the Blind of Ireland
RCH/248X Postponed Demonstration of screereading software
9 March Ned Potter
(Library)
CSE/082 Explorations in UX: ethnography and design at the University of York library
16 March Heather O'Brien
University of British Columbia
CSE/082 User engagement and learning in digital information environments: Complementary or contradictory processes?

Abstracts

12 January
Anna Bramwell-Dicks: Music while you work: The effect of music on transcription typing performance and experience

Exposure to music is a frequent part of our everyday lives and there is a wealth of empirical evidence that music affects people's behaviour and experiences. However, despite the evidence that music can affect people, theories for why and how music affects people are lacking. More research is needed in different contexts to help us to understand why music is such an affective medium. In particular, there is a need to extend the research beyond manipulating just tempo and volume of the music to understand the effect of more dimensions of music on behaviour and experience.

During my PhD, I investigated how music affects people when typing - a mundane, work-related computing task. In this seminar I will present a number of experiments looking at how different dimensions of music (including presence of vocals, style, genre, volume, tempo and time signature) affect transcription typing performance and experience.

19 January
Yannis Darzentas: Systems Thinking in HCI and Design

In HCI we are dealing with human-centric problems that are, in their majority, complex and wicked. As a result, such problems are difficult to understand and deal with. The robustness of the suggested ways of tackling these problems depends on capturing as much of the relevant Design Space as possible. Systems Thinking is, among other approaches, one that claims to aid the efforts to capture and understand the design problem space and describe in an operational way the possible tackling of it. Definitions, properties, and possible applications of Systems Thinking to HCI and Design, will be presented with examples.

Monday 23 January
Judy Edworthy: Alarm design and implementation in complex and safety-critical domains

Alarm sounds are still ubiquitous in almost every work domain, and in some environments their use is so prolific that the term 'alarm fatigue' is used to describe over-exposure and noncompliance with alarms, particularly in the clinical environment. Part of the 'alarm problem' centres around the alarm sounds themselves, and in this talk I will focus on recent work that I have carried out with collaborators in Europe and in the US working towards improving the design of audible alarms. I will demonstrate how improvements in audible alarm design can have a broad impact on work practice. I will focus on two areas: the design of alarms for the European Space Agency control centre at Darmstadt, Germany, and current work on updating clinical alarms intended to support a global medical device standard.

9 February
Alistair Edwards: Clickbait – post-truth?

In a previous seminar I explored the phenomenon of clickbait. I wish to return to the topic because of two developments since then. One is that I supervised (Eason) Yiteng Xing's project on this topic and found out more about it. Secondly we seem to have entered an age which some are referring to as post truth.

I will discuss some of Eason's results, which were not always in line with expectations. Something else that arose from Eason's project was (as so often) a realization as to things that we do not know. Particularly, while there are definitions of clickbait, it is not always easy to apply them. If we are in a post-truth era, companies such as Facebook are pledging to implement technological solutions, and yet it seems that the subtle boundaries being tested may not lend themselved to such approaches.

Warning One of the techniques used by clickbait designers is to catch people's attention by displaying shocking or provocative material. Some of this may be displayed in this seminar.

2 February
Nervo Verdezoto: Understanding and Designing Technology to Fit People's Everyday Practices: Challenges and Opportunities in Healthcare and Sustainability

There is a growing desire to address societal challenges in healthcare and sustainability through the use of information technology such as medication reminders and smart electricity meters. Although these technologies have managed to raise awareness regarding people’s care activities or energy consumption, most of these technologies have failed to consider how people actually use and integrate these devices into their everyday practices. As a result, people still find it difficult to adopt and embrace these technologies to improve their health or save energy. For example, an older adult with an active lifestyle might frequently be outside the home (e.g., at work, restaurant or any other social setting) when they are supposed to take their blood pressure or medication, challenging their care activities in relation to their everyday practices. Taking a practice-based research approach, this talk presents the challenges and opportunities for designing a new generation of information technologies (e.g., self-care technology, eco-feedback technology, etc.) that can better fit into people’s everyday practices. These points are presented using several case studies in healthcare and sustainability e.g., investigating the older adults medication management practices as well as the practices of residents of a sensor-equipped student dormitory targeted to motivate them to reduce and shift their energy consumption.

Biography

Nervo Xavier Verdezoto is an Assistant Professor/Lecturer in Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) at the Department of Informatics, University of Leicester. He is a member of the Interaction Design and Evaluation of Socio-technical Systems (IDEAS) Group. Previously, he was a postdoctoral researcher at the Ubiquitous Computing and Interaction Group at the Department of Computer Science, Aarhus University in Denmark. He also was research assistant at the Centre for Pervasive Healthcare at Aarhus University during his PhD studies. His work combines fieldwork with user-centered and participatory design methods to further understand people’s everyday practices, different stakeholder’s needs, and how people appropriate technology. In particular, he has been working in various research projects related to healthcare, physical computing, and sustainable HCI.

16 February
Sally Quinn: Do facial judgments predict the re-tweeting of images of missing and wanted people on Twitter?

In recent years, Twitter has become a powerful medium used by the Police to ask for the public’s help in tracking down missing and wanted individuals. The Police often post images of these people as part of their appeal and the public can retweet (share) these images in a bid to help the police find these people. First impressions from the face often bias our behaviour towards unknown others (e.g. Airbnb hosts who look more trustworthy get more customers and can charge more). In this talk, I present a series of studies which examine the relationships between first impressions from faces and how these relate to the number of retweets the images of wanted and missing people received. These studies open up discussion of whether there are optimal photos that the police can select to maximise sharing on social media.

3 March
Stuart Lawler: Demonstration of screereading software

Postponed to next term.

Stuart will talk about his use of technology as a blind person, and give demonstrations of some of the technology he uses. He is very happy to discuss anything to do with visual impairment and technology.

9 March
Ned Potter: Explorations in UX: ethnography and design at the University of York library

Over the last two years the University Library has started to use various ethnographic techniques to better understand our users. These include behavioural mapping, cognitive mapping, touchstone tours, unstructured interviews and even love / break-up letters. As a result we've learned more about the staff and students involved than we've ever learned about any group of users before.

This presentation will cover how we've approached the three major UX projects we've undertaken so far, explore the results and the changes we've made to our systems as a result of UX, and ask the room for their own views and expertise about how we're using UX, what we should change and how we should move forward.

Ned Potter is an Academic Liaison Librarian and has played a leading role in the UX work at the library, as well as co-organising the international User Experience in Libraries Conference.

16 March
Heather O'Brien: User engagement and learning in digital information environments: Complementary or contradictory processes?

Biography

Heather O'Brien is an Associate Professor at the iSchool, University of British Columbia, where she teaches and researches in the area of human information interaction. Dr. O'Brien is best known for her work in the area of user engagement with technology, where she has contributed numerous publications, including two recent books, Why Engagement Matters: Cross-Disciplinary Perspectives and Innovations on User Engagement with Digital Media (edited with Paul Cairns, 2016) and Measuring User Engagement (authored with Mounia Lalmas and Elad Yom-Tov, 2014), as well as the User Engagement Scale (UES), an experiential questionnaire that is used internationally to understand digitally mediated user experiences.

Summer Term 2017

Date Speaker Room Title
(Links to abstract)
20 April Sam Simpson CSE/082 Postponed How do experienced mindfulness practitioners develop a mindful life and what does this tell us about playing computer games mindfully?
27 April Chris Power CSE/082 The Science of Getting Stuck: Understanding Perceived Uncertainty in Interactive Systems
4 May LMB/036
11 May CSE/082
Wednesday 17 May Helen Petrie CSE/082 Departmental seminar
Usable security: a view from HCI
18 May Tobias Mülling
University of Brighton
CSE/082 Embracing the Gesture-Driven Interface: challenges for the design of graphical mid-air interfaces using a gestural approach
Wednesday 24 May Alistair Edwards CSE/082 Postponed Departmental seminar
The SRC Common Base Policy
25 May Andrew Lewis CSE/082 Postponed Introduction to the Mobile ESM application
1 June Guido Gybels
Consultant in accessibility and usability
CSE/082 No user left behind: embedding accessibility and usability throughout design and implementation
8 June Aaron Quigley
University of St Andrews
CSE/082 Ubiquitous User Interfaces
15 June John Mateer
TFTV
CSE/082 Directing for Cinematic Virtual Reality: the relationship between 'presence', 'transportation' and 'suspension of disbelief'
22 June David Zendle CSE/082 Postponed VR Workshop: An introduction to designing and conducting room-scale VR experiments with Unity3D and the HTC Vive

27 April
Chris Power: The Science of Getting Stuck: Understanding Perceived Uncertainty in Interactive Systems

Imagine a gamer, trying to jump over a chasm for the twentieth time, wondering if they are doing something wrong, or if the game just too hard for them. Picture a family historian navigating through 300 pages of search results to discover a long lost aunt, but unsure which poorly labelled link will lead to her place of birth. Envision financial analysts who want insights about their business, but cannot orient themselves in multi-dimensional data because the system does not react they way they expect. Finally, remember your own experiences, when you were hopelessly lost on a website, unable to find that form or policy you needed, even though you were sure you found it before.

All of these scenarios are examples of users experiencing uncertainty in interactive systems. This uncertainty leads users to getting "stuck" and unable to progress in their tasks. Some of this uncertainty is unavoidable, caused by what we are trying to do, such as solving hard problems or playing a game. In other cases, uncertainty is unnecessary, caused by the design and feedback of the interactive system.

In this talk I will discuss some of the work that has been ongoing by our PhD and MSc students looking at untangling this problem.

18 May
Tobias Mülling: Embracing the Gesture-Driven Interface: challenges for the design of graphical mid-air interfaces using a gestural approach

Mid-air interaction has been investigated for many years, and with the launch of affordable sensors such as Microsoft Kinect (Microsoft Corporation), Leap Motion (Leap Motion, Inc.) and Myo Armband (Thalmic Labs Inc.), this type of interaction has become more popular. However, graphical interfaces for mid-air interaction have been designed using two dominant styles: cursor-based, where the user's hand replicates the mouse movement by copying the WIMP interaction pattern (Windows, Icons, Menus, and Pointing), and gesture-library, where different gestures are assigned to the functionalities of a system, generating a cognitive overload due to the need for recall over recognition. The use of a gestural approach based on manipulation presents itself as an alternative to the mentioned interaction styles, with a focus on enhancing the user experience in 2D Design Patterns. Taking a practice-based research approach, this talk presents the design space of a gestural approach based on manipulation, with challenges and strategies that can be used in the design of graphical interfaces for mid-air interaction. A series of experiments will be presented to exemplify the use of visual elements and mid-air gestures, in an attempt to create gesture-driven interfaces with a satisfactory user experience.

25 May
Andrew Lewis: Introduction to the Mobile ESM application

The experience sampling method is a well established research methodology that asks participants to stop at certain times and make notes about their experience. Traditionally, this has been done with a paper booklet and a pager. Modern smartphones and mobile devices are able to update this procedure to deliver a questionnaire online, either paging the participant, or allowing the participant to directly send data to the researcher in response to a predetermined event. In this talk I will describe an opensource framework that allows researchers to develop ESM applications for Android and iOS devices, explain how to setup the environment, generate questions, and look at the results.

1 June
Guido Gybels: No user left behind: embedding accessibility and usability throughout design and implementation

The staggering development of information and communication technology, at sustained, exponential rates in many areas, has brought tremendous change to the way people live, work and entertain themselves. The ubiquity of ICT, the march of “smart” devices and the ever more ambient nature of technology have changed our world fundamentally.

In our modern Society, then, the ability to access, understand and use all these products and services is not just nice to have, but is absolutely essential for full opportunity and participation as a citizen.

However, users exhibit a wide diversity in terms of abilities and preferences. The diversity is such that defining mainstream interaction models is challenging, and any notion of mainstream implies also the need to cater for those interactions that fall outside it. A proper understanding of, and consideration for, the broad variety of user needs and requirements manifesting themselves as a consequence of these different individual abilities, characteristics and preferences is thus essential.

In this short seminar we will take a crash course on how to embed accessibility and usability in the scope, design, development, implementation and delivery of ICTs. We will look at the relationship between accessibility and usability, at the demographics that drive the abovementioned wide variety of needs and requirements, the relationship between mainstream ICT and assistive technology and some common myths and misunderstandings about accessibility and usability.

This is not a new topic and there have been a great many projects, research, investigations, pilot programmes, e-inclusion charters and investment in this field. But while we see exponential developments in many aspects of technology, it often seems as though progress in accessibility and usability is painfully slow. In this seminar, we will therefore also touch upon the need for a more pre-emptive approach to the problem, recognising that retrofitting functionality to existing systems and services is often much harder than designing for it from the start.

We will also look at moving towards a deliberate, process-driven approach to accessibility and usability as opposed to the often ad-hoc or post-fact approach we see today. Finally, we will consider what further research may be helpful in progressing the accessibility and usability agenda.

Biography

Having written his first computer programme in 1979 and with over three decades of professional experience, Guido Gybels is a veteran technology expert with a proven track record of award-winning innovation, research and development, software and hardware engineering, standardisation and policy and regulation. A former Director of New Technologies and Director of Technology, he is also an accomplished senior manager with in-depth understanding of the wider context in which technology solutions must operate. He is a long-standing advocate of the view that technology is there to serve the user, not the other way around.

8 June
Aaron Quigley: Ubiquitous User Interfaces

Displays are all around us, on and around our body, fixed and mobile, bleeding into the very fabric of our day to day lives. Displays come in many forms such as smart watches, head-mounted displays or tablets and fixed, mobile, ambient and public displays. However, we know more about the displays connected to our devices than they know about us. Displays and the devices they are connected to are largely ignorant of the context in which they sit including knowing physiological, environmental and computational state. They don't know about the physiological differences between people, the environments they are being used in, if they are being used by one or more persons.

In this talk I review a number of aspects of displays in terms of how we can model, measure, predict and adapt how people can use displays in a myriad of settings. With modeling we seek to represent the physiological differences between people and use the models to adapt and personalize designs, user interfaces. With measurement and prediction we seek to employ various computer vision and depth sensing techniques to better understand how displays are used. And with adaptation we aim to explore subtle techniques and means to support diverging input and output fidelities of display devices. This talk draws on a number of studies from work published in UIST, CHI, MobileHCI, IUI, AVI and UMAP.

Biography

Professor Aaron Quigley is the Chair of Human Computer Interaction in the School of Computer Science at the University of St Andrews, UK. Aaron is one of the ACM Future of Computing Academy convenors, ACM SIGCHI Vice President for Conferences and program co-chair for the ACM IUI 2018 conference in Tokyo Japan. Aaron's research interests include surface and multi-display computing, human computer interaction, pervasive and ubiquitous computing and information visualisation. He has published over 160 internationally peer-reviewed publications including edited volumes, journal papers, book chapters, conference and workshop papers and holds 3 patents. In addition he has served on over 80 program committees and has been involved in chairing roles of over 20 international conferences and workshops including UIST, ITS, CHI, Pervasive, UbiComp, Tabletop, LoCA, UM, I-HCI, BCS HCI and MobileHCI.

15 June
John Mateer: Directing for Cinematic Virtual Reality: the relationship between 'presence', 'transportation' and 'suspension of disbelief'

The emerging medium of 'Cinematic Virtual Reality' (CVR) features media fidelity that approaches what is found in feature film. Unlike traditional VR, CVR limits the level of control users have within the environment to choosing viewpoints rather than interacting with the world itself. This means that CVR production arguably represents a new type of filmmaking. 'Suspension of disbelief' represents the level of immersion audiences experience when watching a film. Likewise, 'presence' refers to a similar experiential measure in Virtual Reality though it is considered slightly differently. This talk considers the use of 'transportation theory' as a bridge between these constructs to enable established film directing methods to be more readily transferred to Virtual Reality and, specifically, Cinematic VR production.

22 June
David Zendle: VR Workshop: An introduction to designing and conducting room-scale VR experiments with Unity3D and the HTC Vive

Over the past two years, VR technology has become increasingly accessible, with many christening 2017 the 'year of VR'. For those unfamiliar with this new equipment, this session offers an overview of the capabilities of much of the VR equipment currently on the market, with a particular focus on the HTC Vive: The most advanced head-mounted display that is widely available to commercial consumers.

Following this, a broad overview of development for this new technology will be given, including the 'live-coding' of a VR simulation in the Unity3D game engine. Hands-on trials of the Vive will then be made available, whilst attendees split into groups to workshop potential new studies they could conduct with this exciting new technology.

Summer vacation 2017

Date Speaker Room Title
(Links to abstract)
14.00
on 3 August
Fatma Layas CSE/102-103 Crowdsourcing for socially responsible projects: the motivation of the crowd to participate in a project to support blind and partially sighted students*
14.30 on 29 August  Zaidatol Haslinda Abdullah Sani (Linda) CSE/102 Using Technology to Address the Problems of Malnutrition and Dehydration in Older Adults*

* There will be cakes!

Abstracts

3 August
Fatma Layas:Crowdsourcing for socially responsible projects: the motivation of the crowd to participate in a project to support blind and partially sighted students

There is a growing interest in crowdsourcing projects for socially responsible issues. One area of socially responsible crowdsourcing is to support people with disabilities. However, there is little exploration of what motivates people to participate in such projects. This programme of research investigated the motivators for students to participate in a socially responsible crowdsourcing project to support blind and partially sighted students by describing images found in digital learning resources. For this purpose a crowdsourcing project, DescribeIT, was developed.

The first study explored what students thought would motivate them to participate in the project to compare with students’ actual behaviour in the following studies. Altruism and monetary rewards were the leading self-reported motivational factors, other factors such as being interested in accessibility were reported.

Studies 2 to 6 investigated the effects of different intrinsic and extrinsic motivational factors on students’ participation in the DescribeIT project with students from the UK and Arab countries. Despite the promising results of the self-reports of motivations, UK students’ participation rates in Studies 2 to 4 was extremely low. However, paying UK students small amounts of money (Study 6) did motivate them to participate. Arab students (Study 5) were intrinsically motivated to participate in the DescribeIT project and showed a higher participation rate than UK students.

Studies 7 and 9 investigated the quality of the image descriptions produced by crowd members of established crowdsourcing platforms in comparison to those produced by students. The results showed a comparable quality across descriptions produced by students and crowd members.

Studies 8 and 9 investigated the effect of simplifying the image description task by changing it to an image tagging task and showed that making the task easier increased participation rate. Lastly, Study 10 investigated the effect of a face-to-face training session on image description quality. It also investigated the effect of quality control instructions on quality. The face-to-face training increased description quality, but different quality control instructions did not.

The practical implications of this research for crowdsourcers in socially responsible crowdsourcing contexts, are that they need to consider the cultural backgrounds of their potential crowd, make the task easy to do, offer small payments if possible and train crowd members in order to produce good quality work. The theoretical implications are a greater understanding of the motivations of crowd members in socially responsible projects and the importance of measuring both self-reports of motivation and actual behaviour.

29 August
Linda Zaidatol:Using Technology to Address the Problems of Malnutrition and Dehydration in Older Adults

Malnutrition and dehydration of important problems for older adults even in developed countries such as the UK and both have many serious health consequences. This programme of research developed an app, MyHealthyLiving, to support older adults in monitoring their intake of liquids and fruit and vegetables. I followed a user-centred design lifecycle and conducted six studies, starting with focus groups to understand the older users' needs and wishes, through expert and user evaluations, to a two week field study of the use of the app by 15 older people. Using the data from the user evaluations, a new set of evidence-based heuristics for the development and evaluation of tablet apps for older people was also produced.


Autumn Term 2017

Date Speaker Room Title
(Links to abstract)
5 October Helen Petrie, Paul Cairns, Chris Power,
David Zendle, Alistair Edwards
CSE/266-267 My research and my favourite student project
12 October Helen Petrie CSE/266-267 HCI and food sustainability
19 October Chad Gowler CSE/266-267 Asking about gender: How to ask and why it matters
26 October Alistair Edwards CSE/266-267 Nudging students into better money management
2 November Andreas Savva CSE/266-267 Understanding accessibility problems of blind users on the web
9 November Hend Albassam CSE/266-267 Modelling Outlying Performance
16 November Helen Petrie CSE/266-267 Flash mob usability testing  
23 November David Zendle CSE/266-267CSE/082-083 Do Video Games Make You Violent? New Evidence From a Repeated Measures Design
30 November No seminar: Helen Petrie and Chris Power will be giving this week's Departmental Seminar

Abstracts

5 October
Helen Petrie, Paul Cairns, Chris Power, David Zendle & Alistair Edwards: My research and my favourite student project

This is mainly a chance for new members of the Group to find out about the research of the established members. We will outline our research interests in general and talk about one (or more) of the related student projects that we have supervised. This will give new students a chance to start thinking about the kind of project they might like to undertake.

12 October

October 16 is World Food Day and Helen will speak about her part in the IKnowFood Project.

19 October
Chad Gowler: Asking about gender: How to ask and why it matters

Between 1 and 5 percent of the UK population identifies as having a non-binary gender or are transgender. We ask people their gender all the time, but do we really understand what this means and the assumptions we make? This talk aims to help researchers understand what gender is and what it means, when asking for it is appropriate and how to design forms that are inclusive.

Slides (PDF)

26 October
Alistair Edwards: Nudging students into better money management

Many people – including students – find it difficult to manage their personal finances. A local small company is trying to address this by developing an app. The app monitors income and expenditure. From time to time it needs to present messages to the user, often warnings about over-spending. How should such messages be worded in order to be most likely to elicit the best response? Nudge theory might suggest different types of wording, but given that not everyone is the same the wording that works for one person might not work for another.

This talk will be based on Musa Babagana's student project, in which he found that a personality test could be used to match individuals to wordings. It will also cover some interesting methodological challenges encountered, some of them relating to the use of the Amazon Mechanical Turk crowd sourcing website.

2 November
Andreas Savva: Understanding accessibility problems of blind users on the web

The web is an eminently visual medium. However, not everyone accesses web content visually. Research shows that using the web is challenging for blind users. To create a good user experience for blind users on the web, we need a comprehensive understanding of the users' problems. Currently, there is little knowledge about the problem differences between blind and sighted users, which makes it difficult to suggest and test design solutions that address these problems.

This research aims to provide a further understanding of the problems blind users have on the web by comparing and contrasting problems between blind and sighted users and testing how design solutions to prevalent problems benefit blind users' experience.

The first study draws together the research literature into a common unified definition of web accessibility that was used to operationalise studies. The second study compared which verbal protocol (concurrent or retrospective) is better in user-based studies. The results showed that retrospective verbal protocol is a better option for eliciting problems on the web for blind and sighted users.

Then, an empirical study compared the problems between blind and sighted users on the web. The results showed that the problems the two user groups encounter largely differ. There are specific problem types distinct to blind users, but also the characteristics of the problem types that had instances by both user groups were very different. Moreover, many problems blind users encounter were in relation to the search and browse features of the websites.

A further investigation by two studies with blind users of how specific design solutions to prevalent problems users had (poor page structure, lack of feedback and excessive effort) in this specific design aspect showed that simple design solutions improve specific aspects of users' experience. Although, for major improvements in the overall user experience a combination of design solutions is needed.

9 November
Hend Albassam: Modelling Outlying Performance

It is always assumed by most usability studies that user performance accurately represented by a normal distribution. However, it has been found by some researchers that during usability testing there is always one user who is substantially slower than others. This outlying performance needs more investigation because most studies focus on average performance. Therefore, our study aiming at investigating the possible factors that cause outlying performance. Also, we are going to propose a model of outlying performance in menu search. And that model could be used as analytical tool to help designers to predict which design make a difference and improve usability for those users who are really struggling and making them happier by improving the quality of their interaction with systems. This is significantly considered one of the main goals of Human Computer Interaction (HCI).

16 November 2017
Helen Petrie: Flash mob usability testing

This is World Usability Day, and we will mark it by undertaking a cooperative usability evaluation.

23 November
David Zendle: Do Video Games Make You Violent? New Evidence From a Repeated Measures Design

The GAM, or General Aggression Model, is currently the dominant theoretical model when it comes to predicting the effects of violent video games (VVGs) on their players. The GAM predicts that being exposed to violent content in a video game makes violent concepts easier to access for players, leading to increases in antisocial behaviour. Furthermore, the GAM predicts that repeatedly playing a violent video game will make these concepts even more easy to access, leading to long-term changes in player behaviour. However, recent research in the literature has challenged this dominant perspective, arguing that seemingly definitive results reported in the literature are in fact the product of systematic confounding.

So, do violent video games make their players violent? This talk presents an overview of the theory of video game effects. It then moves on to focus on a new study that helps to answer this question through the use of an innovative and rigorous approach to experimental design.