In-Vehicle Avatars to Elicit Social Response and Change Driving Behaviour

Social and psychological theories have provided a plethora of evidence showing that the physical difficulty to express appropriate social interactions between drivers expresses itself in aggression, selfish driving and anti-social behaviour. Therefore there is a need to improve interactions between drivers and allow clearer collective decision making between them. Personal characteristics and the driving situations play strong roles in driver’s aggression. Our approach is centered around the driving situation as opposed to focusing on personality characteristics. It examines aggression and manipulates contextual variables such as driver’s eye contact exchanges. This paper presents a new unobtrusive in-vehicle system that aims at communicating drivers’ intentions, elicit social responses and increasing mutual awareness. It uses eye gaze as a social cue to affect collective decision making with the view to contribute to safe driving. The authors used a driving simulator to design a case control experiment in which eye gaze movements are conveyed with an avatar. Participants were asked to drive through different types of intersections. An avatar representing the head of the other driver was displayed and driver behaviour was analysed. Significant eye gaze pattern difference where observed when an avatar was displayed. Drivers cautiously refer to the avatar when information is required on the intention of others (e.g. when they do not have the right of way). The majority of participants reported the perception of “being looked at”. The number of glances and time spent gazing at the avatar did not indicate an unsafe distraction by standards of in-vehicle device ergonomic design. Avatars were visually consulted primarily in less demanding driving situations, which underlines their non-distractive nature.

Location-Based Mobile Storytelling

This article describes an investigation in location-based mobile storytelling entitled Tracking Agama. Using a combination of SMS messaging, voice calls, and web log entries, Tracking Agama leads its participants on a narrative-based exploration of Los Angeles, in pursuit of a fabled urban researcher, “Agama.” Participants use a bit of detective work to discover the keywords allowing access to Agama’s voice-activated and phone-accessible audio diary entries; send and receive SMS messages from Agama and his assistant; and receive calls from the virtual characters.

Involvement, Elaboration and the Sources of Online Trust

Establishing trust in online encounters has attracted significant recent research interest. A large part of this work focuses on those factors that can be manipulated on a website to influence consumers’ trusting beliefs. A notable part of this research concerns the influence of website infrastructure attributes [design and interaction elements] on consumers’ assessment of vendor trustworthiness in the absence of knowledge-based transactional experience. Developing this work further, we introduce the established marketing concepts of ‘involvement’ and ‘elaboration’. Consumer involvement describes the relevance of a situation or decision for an individual. In the marketing literature, the importance of this concept lies in the fact that it influences an individual’s information search and processing strategies. Noting this, propositions are advanced suggesting that the infrastructure attributes that individuals use as informational cues may in fact influence assessments of trusting beliefs differently according to whether individuals face high or low involvement situations

A Multi-Facet Analysis of Factors Affecting the Adoption of Multimedia Messaging Service (MMS)

Mobile applications such as multimedia messaging service (MMS) promises a new way to share rich content of information that enhances its users’ personal connectivity experiences as well as productivity. However, the adoption of MMS seems to be unexpectedly slow (Bonte, 2008). As mobile phones become ever smarter (or complex) in functions, understanding the adoption behaviors of complex mobile services such as MMS becomes utterly important to both practitioners and academic. This chapter introduces a multi-facet model for MMS adoption by integrating the well-known behavioral models such as TAM and TPB with other factors including intrinsic motivation, personal innovativeness and critical mass. An internet survey of 213 subjects with prior experience in MMS usage found strong support for the proposed model. The results show that the adopter’s attitude toward MMS is the most dominating factor in shaping his/her intention to use MMS, followed by subjective norm and perceived behavioral control. Moreover, the results further suggest adopter’s intrinsic motivation is the most important motivating factor for attitude toward using MMS. Implications of these findings are discussed for researchers and practitioners.

Humans and Emerging RFID Systems

Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) technology offers a lot of promises. To redeem them, RFID applications have to respect privacy and they need to be supported by the legal system. The article evaluates how the current EU directives on data protection support emerging applications that are based on RFID tags. The evaluation is based on user scenarios that illustrate human needs in relation to technologies and applications. The article continues earlier analyses and uses more realistic and state-of-the-art applications and scenarios. We conclude by pointing out further research needs in the field of RFID and data protection.

User-Centred Systems Design as Organizational Change

This paper presents a longitudinal case study in which six Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) researchers worked extensively in an action research cooperation with a public authority over a period of four years. The purpose of the cooperation was to increase the focus on usability in the authority, and the main research question was how user centred systems design and increased awareness on work environment in relation to computer usage could promote organizational change in a public authority. The overarching research approach in this project has been action research and the data used in this paper is derived from an evaluation performed at the end of the project, as well as through our experiences from working with the project. The results involve aspects relating to organizational issues, management support, strategic documents and end-user participation. Moreover the results include methodological support for bringing users and developers closer together and individual and organisational attitudes to development. The purpose of this paper is to make some general conclusions on how to bring about change when approaching a large public authority with the purpose of introducing usability and user centred systems design.

On User Experience Measurement Needs

Measurements related to user expectations, behaviors and experiences can provide useful data to many roles and teams in a company. Each role provides different views to the question “what should be measured, and why?” We conducted an empirical study on user experience (UX) measurement needs at different units and levels in one corporate (Nokia) and asked which kinds of UX measurements would be useful for different functions. We identified common UX measurement needs on 8 different themes.

Organizational Communication

Significant research has focused on e-mail, face-to-face (FTF), and other asynchronous mediated communication as the communication media of choice within organizations. Modern organizations, however, have other unconventional tools at their disposal. While the economy of scale has made videoconferencing an affordable medium of choice because it precludes travel and is accessible on demand, the suitability of the videoconferencing for organizational meetings is scarce in the literature. As such, this paper explores and presents an account of videoconferencing use in a governmental organization and address implications for meetings and general communication process.

Designing Ubiquitous Content for Daily Lifestyle

This article presents a design theory for an emerging genre in digital content called Ubiquitous Contents. To design entertaining experience, the article introduces the design concept of the Experience Chain. Examples are shown to illustrate how people, artifacts, and environment can be seamlessly connected to design emotional and entertaining experiences through the interaction.

A Motive Analysis as a First Step in Designing Technology for the use of Intuition in Criminal Investigation

Investigators occasionally rely on intuitive feelings during crime solving, but have no technological tool targeting directly on mediating this investigation factor. Technology that encourages the sharing and alerting of hunches therefore seemed to be needed. A motive analysis of interviews with criminal investigators was performed as part of an investigation aiming at adding hunches to the criminal investigators’ visualization tools (the project management system to keep track of the investigation). Purpose of the study was to explore how a motive analysis (by revealing the criminal investigators’ motives and attitudes) could contribute in the first phase of the design. The assumption that designing for intuition could be useful, was confirmed by all of the informants. The study gave valuable input to how motive analysis could be used to identify suitable requirements, by resulting in a proposed technological concept supporting the use of intuitive feelings in criminal investigation.