Constructionist Prototype Programming in a First Semester HCI Course for Engineering Students

How can we merge interactive design processes and the development of interactive prototypes for first-semester students without prior programming experience? The authors provide a selection of relevant contructionism-inspired programming tools and provide indications on how one of them can enrich a user-centred design project for first-semester software and IT engineering students. They do this by describing the experiences from two runs of a HCI course and the concurrent semester projects. The students developed interactive touch-based learning apps for children in the fourth to sixth grade using App Inventor. Most of the project groups managed to do three iterations of specifying requirements, doing conceptual design, physical and interactive prototyping, and user evaluation. The groups implemented quite complex programs with multiple-screen switching, multiple interfaces, media such as pictures, animations and sound, database connection, Web-server connection, and integrated sensors, such as camera, accelerometer, etc. The students did a lot more project iterations and spent more time on the creative designs in real-life situations than the authors expected. This also allowed for the students' professional reflections on their prototypes, usability, interaction, and the design processes. All in all, this gave them a more profound real-life experience in the user-centred design process. The authors compare the two runs and suggest how to introduce contructionist prototype programming in a HCI course curriculum and conclude that contructionist programming tools can be a valuable addition to the teaching of HCI, and they suggest that further research should be conducted to explore how to best integrate these tools in order to optimize the students' learning capabilities.

Augmented Reality Interfaces for Smart Objects in Ubiquitous Computing Environments

It is the goal of ubiquitous computing (UbiComp) to hide computers from the users. Instead, everyday objects embedded with computer processing capability become smart objects that act as interfaces to computer software. A challenge with this new paradigm of computing is to create natural and obvious ways for people to interact with objects and receive output from the computer software that these objects serve as interfaces to. In this chapter, a solution is proposed whereby virtual user interfaces are added to smart objects. These virtual interfaces are viewed in augmented reality through personal viewing devices which also allow people to interact directly with them. The implementation of UbiComp environments and personal viewing devices is described in order to illustrate the use of current technology in creating user-friendly UbiComp environments.

Visual IHME

In the context of human-driven design and environmental sustainability, the authors have developed a computer-based platform concept for studying and co-designing places (i.e. socially meaningful locations). The Visual IHME platform provides a photo-based, interactive spherical panorama environment with a set of co-creative interaction tools such as discussion boards, questionnaires, and polls on-screen. All creative content can be pinned to specific spatial spots on the image. In a preliminary end-user evaluation of the concept demonstration, the authors found that the participants valued the co-design platform, though many doubted the role of this kind of social technology in terms of real impact on issues that are important to people. They discuss how co-design platforms like Visual IHME can have an impact on environmental sustainability and the evolving role of human-computer interaction research and design in addressing sustainability problems.

Website Interaction between a Football Club and its Supporters

Football teams can explore the benefits of Websites and increase their popularity through the creation of a well-designed Website that will attract users. The fact that football is the leading sport in most countries constitutes an advantage, as it becomes an appealing subject for Internet navigation. This chapter explores the type of relationship that the supporters of Sporting Clube de Portugal have with the football team on the club's official Website. This objective demands an analysis of the characteristics that a Website is required to have in order to attract and engage its intended users. Through a survey conducted via different social media and email communication, this study asked Sporting Clube de Portugal's supporters about their engagement with the Website. In addition, this chapter presents the features that users consider to be most important in a football club Website.

Multimodal User Interface in E-Learning Environments

Multimodal interaction is a proposal to turn the interaction between humans and machines more natural, increasing the usability, flexibility, and convenience of one application. Improve an application with multimodal features impacts on its architecture and, to describe the main components to treat the multimodality, some architecture models are proposed in the literature, including for Web multimodal systems. E-Learning environments are Web-based systems and need a good usability, flexibility, and convenience: requirements that can be improved with implementation of multimodal features on them. Since they have their own peculiarities, we need a more specific multimodal architecture model described in such a way to reuse the components built for multimodal systems and to connect them with the e-learning environment components. This chapter proposes an architecture for multimodal e-learning environments. A viability study was done in the Ae, an e-learning environment developed using a component-based development process, with components to treat the pen and touch modalities.

Changing Paradigms in Our Interactions with Self-Service Kiosks

Human-computer interaction and holistic user experiences are considered crucial concepts in the design of interactive products, where interactive self-service kiosks require special attention, as they are different than any other type of consumer and personal products. The public nature of self-service kiosks suggests that social context may have an important role in understanding the experience of users when interacting with such products. Yet, this is hardly reflected in the development of self-service kiosks in which usefulness and functionality are still the basic, and usually the only, concerns. This limited discussion hinders innovation when redesigning this type of product. This chapter firstly studies the major factors affecting users' interactions with self-service kiosks, followed by the influence of presence or absence of other people on user experience with interactive self-service kiosks looking at the relationships between different social contexts, feelings, and task performances; it then elaborates on task performances. The studies conducted to explore these relations reveal that interactions with interactive self-service kiosks are specialized according to different task qualities that these kiosks serve as well as the social context, which highlights the necessity to take into account the inseparable context during the design of these self-service kiosks. They emphasize that not only the product interface but also other product features, product body, and context should be shaped by these task qualities and the social context. Hence, suggested design implications go beyond traditional usability and technical issues, considering social context as a key issue to address innovative self-service kiosk designs.

Length Perceptual Characteristics on Raised-Dot Slippages

If line-shape information was physically presented by virtue of some kind of mechanical interface, man-machine communication would be enhanced in the sense of multi-modal interactions. In order for such interactions to be available with ease, they should be realized as simple, small, and cheap devices even though suffering from a bit of performance decrease. Thus, the authors have studied a mouse-like computer-human mechanical interface. The idea is that slippage stimuli on a fingerpad would be effective enough to provide users a piece of motion information, and that the mechanism for slippage can be embodied in mouse interfaces. Here, to enhance the slippage perceptual performance, raised-dots were considered to be useful, and thus, a series of psychophysical experiments were carried out by using raised-dot planes with the period of 1.5, 3.1, 12.5, 30, and 50 mm, together with a without-dot flat plane. It was confirmed that the perceptual lengths were well formulated by a power law: they were proportional to the power of both speed and length. The exponential constants with the length factor were a little less than 1 corresponding to the ideal linear relationship. While the ones with the speed factor were in negative, nearly 0 corresponding to the ideal undisturbed relationship. Then, it was found that the pathway length perceptual accuracies for the raised-dot planes were much superior to that for the flat plane from the viewpoint of (1) length-related perceptual length contractions, (2) speed-induced perceptual length contractions, and (3) perceptual length random errors. This is shown in this chapter.

The Impact of Perceived Visual Complexity, Gender, and Cognitive Style on Children's Aesthetic Preferences for Learning Web Pages

This chapter examines children's aesthetic preferences for learning Web pages designed for them. It applies Berlyne's theory of aesthetic preference to these Web pages: a theory that suggests that people prefer a medium level of stimuli to a low or high level of stimuli. The experiment employs a 3 x 2 x 2 between-subject design; it explores perceived visual complexity, gender, cognitive style, and aesthetic preference. A total of 120 children (60 boys and 60 girls) aged between 11 to 12 years-old take part in the experiment. The children are asked to rate learning Web pages of different levels of perceived visual complexity for aesthetic preference. These Web pages have been created by the authors. The results of the experiment show that overall the children prefer Web pages that display a medium level of perceived visual complexity to those that display a high or low level of perceived visual complexity. Thus, the results support Berlyne's theory. However, when aesthetic preference is analysed with respect to gender, it is found that different levels of perceived visual complexity have an impact on boys' aesthetic preferences but not girls'. In other words, Berylne's theory is only partly supported. Likewise, Berylne's theory is only partly supported when aesthetic preference is analysed with respect to cognitive style. Here, imagers prefer a high level of perceived visual complexity and verbalisers prefer a medium level of perceived visual complexity. This chapter should be of interest to anyone who designs learning Web pages for children.

Teaching Design of Emerging Embodied Technologies

How does design of emerging embodied technologies enrich the HCI learning processes? The authors introduce a model for embodied interaction and use it in the development of a painting app for children based on the motion sensor Asus Xtion Pro (similar to Kinect). The development of the app was part of a HCI course for engineering students. The motion sensor was interesting as a design tool, because it appealed to full body interaction. The development exemplified and unfolded the embodied elements: multiple modalities, physical, bodily, social, and symbolic interaction in a situated environment. Subsequently, the authors introduce a physical-digital toolbox, illustrating the span of parameters within the model for embodied interaction: robot technology, tangibles, wearables, interactive surroundings, and bigger objects.

Including Dyslexic Users in the Early Design of the LITERACY Portal

Human-Centered Design requires end-user consideration and involvement in all steps of the human-computer interface design, but how can this be accomplished if the primary user group is users with special cognitive and affective needs? Would “classical” tools and techniques be sufficient or would they need to be adapted and complemented with special effort? This chapter shares the strategies the authors adopt and the experiences they are gradually gaining in including users with dyslexia in the design of the LITERACY Web-Portal. LITERACY is a project of the European Union aiming at improving social inclusion of youth and adults with dyslexia. The authors hope this case study provides insight on and gives courage for inclusion of end-users even though—or particularly because—they have special needs.