DFP at CHI 2019

DFP will be well represented at this year's 2019 CHI conference in Glasgow, UK, with 11 unique contributions! This is especially impressive considering that DFP is a hugely multidisciplinary Cluster and includes faculty from areas of research not commonly published at CHI. See our contributions below:

Doctoral Consortium (1)

Francesco Vitale
Designing for Long-term Digital Data Management

Digital data is a pervasive component of modern society, with people managing a growing number of data types across many devices. My research explores people's choices on what to keep over the long-term and aims to design personalized data management tools. In a first study, I characterized individual differences in data preservation behaviors. I plan to use interviews, a survey, and probing methods to further extend this characterization and define a design space for long-term data management. Then, I plan to build and evaluate a prototype that synthesizes findings from all my studies.

Paper Sessions (8)

Empathy, Emotion, and Intimate Relationships

Augmenting Couples' Communication with Lifelines: Shared Timelines of Mixed Contextual Information
Carla Griggio, Midas Nouwens, Joanna McGrenere, and Wendy Mackay
Couples exhibit special communication practices, but apps rarely offer couple-specific functionality. Research shows that sharing streams of contextual information (e.g. location, motion) helps couples coordinate and feel more connected. Most studies explored a single, ephemeral stream; we study how couples' communication changes when sharing multiple, persistent streams. We designed Lifelines, a mobile-app technology probe that visualizes up to six streams on a shared timeline: closeness to home, battery level, steps, media playing, texts and calls. A month-long study with nine couples showed that partners interpreted information mostly from individual streams, but also combined them for more nuanced interpretations. Persistent streams allowed missing data to become meaningful and provided new ways of understanding each other. Unexpected patterns from any stream can trigger calls and texts, whereas seeing expected data can replace direct communication, which may improve or disrupt established communication practices. We conclude with design implications for mediating awareness within couples.

Tech for Education

Freedom to Personalize My Digital Classroom: Understanding Teachers' Practices and Motivations
Laton Vermette, Joanna McGrenere,Colin Birge, Adam Kelly, and Parmit Chilana
Although modern classrooms are increasingly moving towards digital immersion and personalized learning, we have few insights into K-12 teachers' current practices, motivations, and barriers in setting up their digital classroom ecosystems. We interviewed 20 teachers on their process of discovering and integrating a vast range of productivity software and educational platforms in their classrooms, with a particular focus on how they personalize the UI and content of these tools (e.g., with plugins, templates, or option menus). We found that teachers largely depended on their own experimentation and professional circles to find, personalize, and troubleshoot software tools to support student needs or their own preferences. Teachers were often hesitant to attempt more advanced personalizations due to concerns over student confusion and increased troubleshooting load. We derive several design implications for HCI to better support teachers in sharing their personalized setups and helping their students benefit from digital immersion.

Knowledge Work

Beyond "One-Size-Fits-All": Understanding the Diversity in How Software Newcomers Discover and Make Use of Help Resources
Kimia Kiani, George Cui, Andrea Bunt, Joanna McGrenere, and Parmit Chilana
For most modern feature-rich software, considerable external help and learning resources are available on the web (e.g., documentation, tutorials, videos, Q&A forums). But, how do users new to an application discover and make use of such resources? We conducted in-lab and diary studies with 26 software newcomers from a variety of different backgrounds who were all using Fusion 360, a 3D modeling application, for the first time. Our results illustrate newcomers' diverse needs, perceptions, and help-seeking behaviors. We found a number of distinctions in how technical and non-technical users approached help-seeking, including: when and how they initiated the help-seeking process, their struggles in recognizing relevant help, the degree to which they made coordinated use of the application and different resources, and in how they perceived the utility of different help formats. We discuss implications for moving beyond "one-size-fits-all" help resources towards more structured, personalized, and curated help and learning materials.

Virtual Reality 

FTVR in VR: Evaluation of 3D Perception With a Simulated Volumetric Fish-Tank Virtual Reality Display
Dylan Fafard, ian Stavness, Martin Dechant, Regan Mandryk, Qian Zhou, and Sidney Fels
Spherical fish tank virtual reality (FTVR) displays attempt to create a virtual "crystal ball" experience using head-tracked rendering. Almost all of these systems have omitted stereo cues, making them easy to build, but it is not clear how much this omission degrades the 3D experience. In this study, we evaluate performance and subjective effects of stereo on 3D perception and interaction tasks with a spherical FTVR display. To control for calibration error and tracking latency, we perform the evaluation on a simulated spherical display in VR. The results of our study provide a clear recommendation for the design and use of spherical FTVR displays: while omitting stereo may not be readily apparent for users, their performance will be significantly degraded (20% - 91% increase in median task time). Therefore, including stereo viewing in spherical displays is critical for use in FTVR.

Are You Sure It's Me?

Towards Undertanding the Link Between Age and Smartphone Authentication
Lina Qiu, Alexander De Luca, Ildar Muslukhov, Konstantin Beznosov
While previous work on smartphone (un)locking has revealed real world usage patterns, several aspects still need to be explored. In this paper, we fill one of these knowledge gaps: the interplay between age and smartphone authentication behavior. To do this, we performed a two-month long field study (N = 134). Our results indicate that there are indeed significant differences across age. For instance, younger participants were more likely to use biometric unlocking mechanisms and older participants relied more on auto locks.

Vulnerability & Blame: Making Sense of Unauthorized Access to Smartphones
Diogo Marques, Tiago Guerreiro, Luis Carrico, Ivan Beschastnikh, and Konstantin Beznosov
Unauthorized physical access to personal devices by people known to the owner of the device is a common concern, and a common occurrence. But how do people experience incidents of unauthorized access? Using an online survey, we collected 102 accounts of unauthorized access. Participants wrote stories about past situations in which either they accessed the smartphone of someone they know, or someone they know accessed theirs. We describe the context leading up to these incidents, the course of events, and the consequences. We then identify two orthogonal themes in how participants conceptualized these incidents. First, participants understood trust as performative vulnerability: trust was necessary to sustain relationships, but building trust required displaying vulnerability to breaches. Second, participants were self-serving in their sensemaking: they blamed the circumstances, or the other person's shortcomings, but rarely themselves. We discuss the implications of our findings for security design and practice.

Designing for Haptics and VR

Haptipedia: Accelerating Haptic Device Discovery to Support Interaction and Engineering Design
Hasti Seifi, Farimah Fazlollahi, Michael Oppermann, John Andrew Sastrillo, Jessica Ip, Ashutosh Agrawal, Gunhyuk Park, Katherine Kuchenbecker, and Karon MacLean
Creating haptic experiences often entails inventing, modifying, or selecting specialized hardware. However, interaction designers are rarely engineers, and 30 years of haptic inventions are buried in a fragmented literature that describes devices mechanically rather than by potential purpose. We conceived of Haptipedia to unlock this trove of examples: Haptipedia presents a device corpus for exploration through metadata that matter to both device and interaction designers. It is a taxonomy of device attributes that go beyond physical description to capture potential utility, applied to a growing database of 105 grounded force-feedback devices, and accessed through a public visualization that links utility to morphology. Haptipedia's design was driven by both systematic review of the haptic device literature and rich input from diverse haptic designers. We describe Haptipedia's reception (including hopes it will redefine device reporting standards) and our plans for its sustainability through community participation.

Understanding People Online

"Can you believe [1:21]?!": Content and Time-Based Reference Patterns in Video Comments
Matin Yarmand, Dongwook Yoon, Samuel Dodson, Ido Roll, and Sidney Fels
As videos become increasingly ubiquitous, so is video-based commenting. To contextualize comments, people often reference specific audio/visual content within video. However, the literature falls short of explaining the types of video content people refer to, how they establish references and identify referents, how video characteristics (e.g., genre) impact referencing behaviors, and how references impact social engagement. We present a taxonomy for classifying video references by referent type and temporal specificity. Using our taxonomy, we analyzed 2.5K references with quotations and timestamps collected from public YouTube comments. We found: 1) people reference intervals of video more frequently than time-points, 2) visual entities are referenced more often than sounds, and 3) comments with quotes are more likely to receive replies but not more "likes". We discuss the need for in-situ dereferencing user interfaces, illustrate design concepts for typed referencing features, and provide a dataset for future studies.

Late-breaking Work: Poster (1)

MojiBoard: Generating Parametric Emojis with Gesture Keyboards
Jessalyn Alvina, Chengcheng Qu, Joanna McGrenere, and Wendy Mackay 
Inserting emojis can be cumbersome when users must swap through panels. From our survey, we learned that users often use a series of consecutive emojis to convey rich, nuanced non-verbal expressions such as emphasis, change of expressions, or micro stories. We introduce MojiBoard, an emoji entry technique that enables users to generate dynamic parametric emojis from a gesture keyboard. With MojiBoard, users can switch seamlessly between typing and parameterizing emojis.

Awards: Best Thesis (1)

Robert Xiao
On-World Computing

SIGCHI Outstanding Dissertation Award
Computers are now ubiquitous. However, computers and digital content have remained largely separate from the physical world – users explicitly interact with computers through small screens and input devices, and the "virtual world" of digital content has had very little overlap with the practical, physical world. My thesis work is concerned with helping computing escape the confines of screens and devices, spilling digital content out onto the physical world around us. In this way, I aim to help bridge the gap between the information-rich digital world and the familiar environment of the physical world and allow users to interact with digital content as they would ordinary physical content. I approach this problem from many angles: from the low-level work of providing high-fidelity touch interaction on everyday surfaces, easily transforming these surfaces into enormous touchscreens; to high-level questions surrounding the interaction design between physical and virtual realms. To achieve this end, building on my prior work, I developed two physical embodiments of this new mixed-reality design: a tiny, miniaturized projector and camera system providing the hardware basis for a projected on-world interface, and a head-mounted augmented-reality head-mounted display modified to support touch interaction on arbitrary surfaces.

Best of CHI: Honorable Mentions (2)

"Can you believe [1:21]?!": Content and Time-Based Reference Patterns in Video Comments
Matin Yarmand, Dongwook Yoon, Samuel Dodson, Ido Roll, and Sidney Fels
As videos become increasingly ubiquitous, so is video-based commenting. To contextualize comments, people often reference specific audio/visual content within video. However, the literature falls short of explaining the types of video content people refer to, how they establish references and identify referents, how video characteristics (e.g., genre) impact referencing behaviors, and how references impact social engagement. We present a taxonomy for classifying video references by referent type and temporal specificity. Using our taxonomy, we analyzed 2.5K references with quotations and timestamps collected from public YouTube comments. We found: 1) people reference intervals of video more frequently than time-points, 2) visual entities are referenced more often than sounds, and 3) comments with quotes are more likely to receive replies but not more "likes". We discuss the need for in-situ dereferencing user interfaces, illustrate design concepts for typed referencing features, and provide a dataset for future studies.

FTVR in VR: Evaluation of 3D Perception With a Simulated Volumetric Fish-Tank Virtual Reality Display
Dylan Fafard, ian Stavness, Martin Dechant, Regan Mandryk, Qian Zhou, and Sidney Fels
Spherical fish tank virtual reality (FTVR) displays attempt to create a virtual "crystal ball" experience using head-tracked rendering. Almost all of these systems have omitted stereo cues, making them easy to build, but it is not clear how much this omission degrades the 3D experience. In this study, we evaluate performance and subjective effects of stereo on 3D perception and interaction tasks with a spherical FTVR display. To control for calibration error and tracking latency, we perform the evaluation on a simulated spherical display in VR. The results of our study provide a clear recommendation for the design and use of spherical FTVR displays: while omitting stereo may not be readily apparent for users, their performance will be significantly degraded (20% - 91% increase in median task time). Therefore, including stereo viewing in spherical displays is critical for use in FTVR.

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