Life-like characters are playing vital role in social computing by making human-computer interaction more easy and spontaneous. Nowadays, use of these characters to interact in online virtual environment has gained immense popularity. In this paper, we proposed a framework for a text-based chat system embodied with a life-like virtual agent that aims at natural communication between the users. To achieve this kind of system, we developed an agent that performs some nonverbal communications such as generating facial expression and motions by analyzing the text messages of the users. More specifically, this agent is capable of generating facial expressions for six basic emotions such as happy, sad, fear, angry, surprise, and disgust along with two additional emotions, irony and determined. Then to make the interaction between the users more realistic and lively, we added motions such as eye blink and head movements. We measured our proposed system from different aspects and found the results satisfactory, which make us believe that this kind of system can play a significant role in making an interaction episode more natural, effective, and interesting. Experimental evaluation reveals that the proposed agent can display emotive expressions correctly 93&#x25; of the time by analyzing the users&#x2019; text input.

Lamia Alam

Mohammed Moshiul Hoque

A Text-Based Chat System Embodied with an Expressive Agent

Mobile platforms have called for attention from HCI practitioners, and, ever since 2007, touchscreens have completely changed mobile user interface and interaction design. Some notable differences between mobile devices and desktops include the lack of tactile feedback, ubiquity, limited screen size, small virtual keys, and high demand of visual attention. These differences have caused unprecedented challenges to users. Most of the mobile user interface designs are based on desktop paradigm, but the desktop designs do not fully fit the mobile context. Although mobile devices are becoming an indispensable part of daily lives, true standards for mobile UI design patterns do not exist. This article provides a systematic literature review of the existing studies on mobile UI design patterns. The first objective is to give an overview of recent studies on the mobile designs. The second objective is to provide an analysis on what topics or areas have insufficient information and what factors are concentrated upon. This article will benefit the HCI community in seeing an overview of present works, to shape the future research directions.

Lumpapun Punchoojit

Nuttanont Hongwarittorrn

Usability Studies on Mobile User Interface Design Patterns: A Systematic Literature Review

The objective of this study is to investigate the effect of the gap between two different mental models on interaction performance through a quantitative way. To achieve that, an index called mental model similarity and a new method called path diagram to elicit mental models were introduced. There are two kinds of similarity: directionless similarity calculated from card sorting and directional similarity calculated from path diagram. An experiment was designed to test their influence. A total of 32 college students participated and their performance was recorded. Through mathematical analysis of the results, three findings were derived. Frist, the more complex the information structures, the lower the directional similarity. Second, directional similarity (rather than directionless similarity) had significant influence on user performance, indicating that it is more effective in eliciting mental models using path diagram than card sorting. Third, the relationship between information structures and user performance was partially mediated by directional similarity. Our findings provide practitioners with a new perspective of bridging the gap between users&#x2019; and designers&#x2019; mental models.

Bingjun Xie

Jia Zhou

Huilin Wang

How Influential Are Mental Models on Interaction Performance? Exploring the Gap between Users&#x2019; and Designers&#x2019; Mental Models through a New Quantitative Method

This study aimed to explore the effects of dominant and compliant personalities, on both flow experience and the external characteristics of flow experience. A total of 48 participants were recruited to play an online game and subsequently asked to recall the songs they had heard while they were playing the game. Eye blink rate was recorded. The results demonstrated that (1) the participant was immersed in the game more if he/she was relatively dominant or noncompliant; (2) the perceptions about the external environment declined remarkably while being in a flow state; and (3) eye blink rates decreased only when the flow happened at the beginning of the game, rather than throughout the whole process. The results suggested that gamers who tend to be dominant or noncompliant were more likely to experience flow. Eye blink rate and perceptions of the external environment could be objective indicators of flow experience.

Pei-Luen Patrick Rau

Yu Chien Tseng

Xiao Dong

Caihong Jiang

Cuiling Chen

The Effect of Personality on Online Game Flow Experience and the Eye Blink Rate as an Objective Indicator

There is a need for appropriate evaluation methods to efficiently identify and counteract usability issues early in the development process. The aim of this study was to investigate how product developers assessed a new theoretical method for identifying usability problems and use errors. Two cases where the method had been applied were selected and the users of the method in them were asked to fill in a questionnaire and were then interviewed about their experiences of using the method. Overall, the participants (students and professionals) found the methods useful and their outcome trustworthy. At the same time, the methods were assessed as difficult to learn and as cumbersome and tedious to use. Nevertheless, both students and professionals thought that the methods would be useful in future development work. Suggestions for further improvement included provision of further instructions, for example, on how to adapt the methods and development of an IT-support tool.

Lars-Ola Blig&#xe5;rd

Helena Str&#xf6;mberg

MariAnne Karlsson

Developers as Users: Exploring the Experiences of Using a New Theoretical Method for Usability Assessment

Everybody experiences every day the need to manage a huge amount of heterogeneous shared resources, causing information overload and fragmentation problems. Collaborative annotation tools are the most common way to address these issues, but collaboratively tagging resources is usually perceived as a boring and time consuming activity and a possible source of conflicts. To face this challenge, collaborative systems should effectively support users in the resource annotation activity and in the definition of a shared view. The main contribution of this paper is the presentation and the evaluation of a set of mechanisms (personal annotations over shared resources and tag suggestions) that provide users with the mentioned support. The goal of the evaluation was to (<svg xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink" xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2000/svg" style="vertical-align:-0.04981995pt" id="M1" height="8.39864pt" version="1.1" viewBox="-0.0498162 -8.34882 6.36303 8.39864" width="6.36303pt"><g transform="matrix(.013,0,0,-0.013,0,0)"><path id="g113-50" d="M384 0V27C293 34 287 42 287 114V635C232 613 172 594 109 583V559L157 557C201 555 205 550 205 499V114C205 42 199 34 109 27V0H384Z"/></g></svg>) assess the improvement with respect to the situation without support; (<svg xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink" xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2000/svg" style="vertical-align:-0.04981995pt" id="M2" height="8.39864pt" version="1.1" viewBox="-0.0498162 -8.34882 6.36303 8.39864" width="6.36303pt"><g transform="matrix(.013,0,0,-0.013,0,0)"><path id="g113-51" d="M412 140C382 77 369 73 315 73H129L270 222C362 320 402 379 402 466C402 571 322 635 234 635C177 635 130 609 99 576L42 495L64 475C90 514 133 568 201 568C274 568 318 519 318 435C318 349 255 267 193 193C144 135 87 78 32 23V0H405C417 45 427 89 440 131L412 140Z"/></g></svg>) evaluate the satisfaction of the users, with respect to both the final choice of annotations and possible conflicts; (<svg xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink" xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2000/svg" style="vertical-align:-0.2063904pt" id="M3" height="8.55521pt" version="1.1" viewBox="-0.0498162 -8.34882 6.36303 8.55521" width="6.36303pt"><g transform="matrix(.013,0,0,-0.013,0,0)"><path id="g113-52" d="M285 378C315 398 338 416 353 432C373 451 384 474 384 503C384 579 325 635 236 635H235C182 635 136 610 108 579L65 516L85 496C110 533 150 575 205 575C258 575 300 543 300 481C300 407 232 369 141 339L147 310C163 315 188 321 211 321C268 321 338 284 338 192C338 94 288 40 217 40C160 40 119 68 93 91C85 98 77 97 69 91C60 84 47 71 46 58C44 46 48 35 62 22C75 10 116 -12 162 -12C234 -12 424 62 424 224C424 297 373 359 285 376V378Z"/></g></svg>) evaluate the usefulness of the support mechanisms in terms of actual usage and user perception. The experiment consisted in a simulated collaborative work scenario, where small groups of users annotated a few resources and then answered a questionnaire. The evaluation results demonstrate that the proposed support mechanisms can reduce both overload and possible disagreement.

Annamaria Goy

Diego Magro

Giovanna Petrone

Claudia Picardi

Marco Rovera

Marino Segnan

An Integrated Support to Collaborative Semantic Annotation

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<p><em>Advances in Human-Computer Interaction</em> is an interdisciplinary journal that publishes theoretical and applied papers covering the broad spectrum of interactive systems.</p>


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<p><em>Advances in Human-Computer Interaction</em> maintains an Editorial Board of practicing researchers from around the world, to ensure manuscripts are handled by editors who are experts in the field of study.</p>


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Advances in Human-Computer Interaction - Table of contents 2017

Advances in Human-Computer Interaction | Hindawi

title

Advances in Human-Computer Interaction is an interdisciplinary journal that publishes theoretical and applied papers covering the broad spectrum of interactive systems.

Advances in Human-Computer Interaction