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The automotive industry is working toward driving automation and driver-assistance technology is becoming a norm in modern cars. Warning alert systems support the driver-car interaction and inform drivers about automation system status, upcoming obstacles, or dangers ahead. However, older drivers' needs are not always addressed in research studies, although they make up a large segment of drivers. Therefore, we conducted a qualitative three-round formative evaluation of a warning alert system using video prototypes in lab and remote settings. The goal was to evaluate visual-, sound-, and speech-based alerts based on: (a) their efficiency in informing drivers about the road situation ahead, and (b) participants' subjective opinions. We evaluated the system's efficiency using self-reported data measuring participants' cognitive load, usability, UX, and ease of use. Also, we conducted interviews to collect subjective feedback about proposed prototypes. In this article, we describe the design of warning alerts and report on their evaluation results. Our results show that speech-based warnings, especially when coupled with visual warnings, are efficient and accepted well by the participants. This article illustrates older drivers' attitude toward the use of different warning modalities in the driving context.

To support radiologists in their decision-making regarding women breast cancer diagnosis based on mammographies, this paper addresses three challenges posed by a Clinical Decision Support System (CDSS) for breast cancer screening, diagnosis, and reporting: multimodality (via textual, graphical, and two-dimensional gestural interaction), usability (via human-computer interactions methods such as knowledge elicitation interviews, scenario-focused questionnaires, multi-fidelity prototyping and user testing), and flexibility (via selected image processing techniques ensuring manual and semi-automatic annotation of breast cancer findings based on radiologists' gestures)

Understanding the limitations and capabilities of the advanced driver-assistance systems (ADAS) is a prerequisite for their safe and comfortable use. This paper presents a formative user study on the use of a dialogue-based system, implemented using the Wizard of Oz (WOz) technique, to help drivers learn about the correct use of driving assistance. We investigated whether drivers would build the correct mental model of the driving assistance systems through natural language dialogue. We describe the evolution of the prototype over four iterations of formative evaluation with older and younger drivers. Using a mixed-method approach, combining the WOz, interviews, questionnaires, and a knowledge quiz, we evaluated the prototype of a voice assistant and identified the teaching content objectives. Participants’ mental model about ADAS was assessed to evaluate the efficacy of the teaching approach. The results show that the teaching goals need to be clearly communicated to the drivers to ensure the adoption of the VA.

Recently we see an increasing number of solutions for the authoring of cross-device and Internet of Things (IoT) applications. While most of these authoring tools have been realised based on existing metaphors and evaluated in subsequent user studies, there is no consensus on how to best enable end users to manage and interact with their devices, IoT objects and services. In order to establish some common guidelines for the development of cross-device and IoT authoring tools, we conducted an elicitation study exploring a user's mental model when defining cross-device interactions in IoT environments. Existing authoring solutions have further been checked for compliance with our guidelines and we developed a fully-compliant end-user authoring tool for cross-device and IoT applications. The presented guidelines may inform the design of new as well as the improvement of existing solutions and form a foundation for discussion, future studies and refinements within the HCI community.

Mobile health (mHealth) innovations are considered by governments as game changers toward more sustainable health systems. The existing literature focuses on the clinical aspects of mHealth but lacks an integrated framework on its sustainability. The foundational idea for this paper is to include disciplinary complementarities into a multi-dimensional vision to evaluate the non-clinical aspects of mHealth innovations. We performed a targeted literature review to find how the sustainability of mHealth innovations was appraised in each discipline. We found that each discipline considers a different outcome of interest and adopts different time horizons and perspectives for the evaluation. This article reflects on how the sustainability of mHealth innovation can be assessed at both the level of the device itself as well as the level of the health system. We identify some of the challenges ahead of researchers working on mobile health innovations in contributing to shaping a more sustainable health system.

The majority of organisations are globalising their software development activities by following the ideas of global software development (GSD). The motivation behind the adoption of GSD phenomena are the list of benefits gained by the software industry. However, there are different challenges face by the GSD organisations, particularly the issues related to software process improvement (SPI). The aim of this study is the identification and classification into categories of the success factors that can impact SPI initiatives taken in GSD organisations. The systematic literature review (SLR) method has been used to extract the success factors from the literature. SLR phases, ‘planning, conducting, and reporting the review’ have been followed to perform this study. Totally, 15 success factors were identified and classified into the six main categories. The authors have also reported the critical success factors of SPI, i.e. management commitment, staff involvement, roles and responsibilities, communication, and resources allocation. This article also reported the similarities and differences between the success factors classified on the bases of client-vendor organisation and size of the organisation. The identified factors can contribute towards the implementation of SPI programme in both client and vendor GSD organisations because these factors represent key areas of process improvement.

We propose a process reference model for UX (UXPRM), which includes a description of the primary UX lifecycle processes within a UX lifecycle and a set of supporting UX methods. The primary UX lifecycle processes are refined into objectives, outcomes and base practices. The supporting UX methods are refined into related techniques, specific objectives and references to the related documentation available in the literature. The contribution of the proposed UXPRM is three-fold: conceptual, as it draws an accurate picture of the UX base practices; practical, as it is intended for both researchers and practitioners and customizable for different organizational settings; methodological, as it supports researchers and practitioners to make informed decisions while selecting UX methods and techniques. This is a first step towards the strategic planning of UX activities.

In this conceptual paper, we present a UX process reference model (UXPRM), explain how it builds on the related work and report our experience using it. The UXPRM includes a description of primary UX lifecycle processes, and a classification of UX methods and artifacts. This work draws an accurate picture of UX base practices and allows the reader to compare and select methods for different purposes. Building on that basis, our future work consists of developing a UX Capability/Maturity Model (UXCMM) intended for UX activity planning according to the organization’s UX capabilities. Ultimately, the UXCMM aims to facilitate the integration of UX processes in software engineering, which should contribute to reducing the gap between UX research and UX practice.

The main aim of the work presented here is to contribute to computer science advances in the multimodal usability area, in-as-much as it addresses one of the major issues relating to the generation of effective oral system messages: how to design messages which effectively help users to locate specific graphical objects in information visualisations? An experimental study was carried out to determine whether oral messages including coarse information on the locations of graphical objects on the current display may facilitate target detection tasks sufficiently for making it worth while to integrate such messages in GUIs. The display spatial layout varied in order to test the influence of visual presentation structure on the contribution of these messages to facilitating visual search on crowded displays. Finally, three levels of task difficulty were defined, based mainly on the target visual complexity and the number of distractors in the scene. The findings suggest that spatial information messages improve participants' visual search performances significantly; they are more appropriate to radial structures than to matrix, random and elleptic structures; and, they are particularly useful for performing difficult visual search tasks., Comment: 9 pages

Multi-fidelity prototyping combines within a single user interface prototype several elements whose representations are reproduced with different levels of fidelity with respect to the final user interface: no fidelity at all, low fidelity, medium fidelity, and high fidelity. In order to effectively and efficiently support multi-fidelity, an original set of techniques is defined and discussed: multiple representation manipulation by sketching and gesture recognition, smooth transition between any representation at any time, prototype reusability, multi-platform support, and multiple user interface prototyping facilities. The full implementation of these techniques in prototyping software provides designers and developers with a unique environment for exploring multiple designs with unprecedented support for quickly designing interfaces from scratch or from previously existing design templates. An experimental study reveals that the multiple representation manipulation together with smooth transition represents a valuable advantage for naturally designing user interfaces. The prototyping software supports several aspects involved in the user interface development life cycle and is convenient for non-WIMP user interfaces.

Input multimodality combining speech and hand gestures has motivated numerous usability studies. Contrastingly, issues relating to the design and ergonomic evaluation of multimodal output messages combining speech with visual modalities have not yet been addressed extensively. The experimental study presented here addresses one of these issues. Its aim is to assess the actual efficiency and usability of oral system messages including brief spatial information for helping users to locate objects on crowded displays rapidly. Target presentation mode, scene spatial structure and task difficulty were chosen as independent variables. Two conditions were defined: the visual target presentation mode (VP condition) and the multimodal target presentation mode (MP condition). Each participant carried out two blocks of visual search tasks (120 tasks per block, and one block per condition). Scene target presentation mode, scene structure and task difficulty were found to be significant factors. Multimodal target presentation proved to be more efficient than visual target presentation. In addition, participants expressed very positive judgments on multimodal target presentations which were preferred to visual presentations by a majority of participants. Besides, the contribution of spatial messages to visual search speed and accuracy was influenced by scene spatial structure and task difficulty: (i) messages improved search efficiency to a lesser extent for 2D array layouts than for some other symmetrical layouts, although the use of 2D arrays for displaying pictures is currently prevailing; (ii) message usefulness increased with task difficulty. Most of these results are statistically significant., Comment: 4 pages

ISBN 3-540-28943-7; International audience; We report an experimental study that aims at investigating the influence of spatial layout on visual search efficiency and comfort. 4 layouts were used for displaying 120 scenes comprising 30 realistic colour photos each: random, elliptic, radial and matrix-like. Scenes (30 per structure) were presented to 5 participants who had to select a pre-viewed photo in each scene using the mouse. Eye-tracking data indicate that elliptic layouts provided better visual comfort than any of the other layouts (shortest scan paths), and proved to be more efficient than matrix layouts (shortest search times). These results are statistically significant (paired t-tests).

26 pages; The original publication is available at www.springerlink.com; A preliminary experimental study is presented, that aims at eliciting the contribution of oral messages to facilitating visual search tasks on crowded visual displays. Results of quantitative and qualitative analyses suggest that appropriate verbal messages can improve both target selection time and accuracy. In particular, multimodal messages including a visual presentation of the isolated target together with absolute spatial oral information on its location in the displayed scene seem most effective. These messages also got top-ranking ratings from most subjects.