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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.

This paper presents empirical results about user-defined gestures for head and shoulders by analyzing 308 gestures elicited from 22 participants for 14 referents materializing 14 different types of tasks in IoT context of use. We report an overall medium consensus but with medium variance (mean: .263, min: .138, max: .390 on the unit scale) between participants gesture proposals, while their thinking time were less similar (min: 2.45 s, max: 22.50 s), which suggests that head and shoulders gestures are not all equally easy to imagine and to produce. We point to the challenges of deciding which head and shoulders gestures will become the consensus set based on four criteria: the agreement rate, their individual frequency, their associative frequency, and their unicity.

Measuring organizational UX Capability/Maturity (UXCM) has been difficult or inaccurate. Moreover, the lack of empirically developed maturity models, models validated in practice, studies demonstrating their benefit and poor documentation or support for their use, has made this measurement even more problematic. To date, there is no straightforward and efficient method to assess UXCM although such assessment is a prerequisite for the improvement of UX processes. UX artifacts, methods and resources contribute toward the execution of UX processes: the production of UX artifacts demonstrate the execution of a process, whereas the use of UX methods demonstrates the implementation of specific UX processes with specific UX resources. In this paper, we present a measurement structure aiming at assessing organizational capabilities to implement UX processes. This structure consists of a capability scale, a maturity scale, a rating scale and a set of process attributes as measurable characteristics of UX processes. The contribution of this paper is threefold: a description of the measurement structure for the UXCM assessment, a questionnaire for the capability assessment by means of online survey or remote interviews and the documentation of a case study demonstrating the efficiency of the proposed model in an industrial project.

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

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

The aim of this experimental study was to investigate the possible influence of spatial layout on the efficiency and visual comfort of target detection on crowded displays. Four layouts were used for presenting sets of 30 realistic colour photos: Random, Elliptic, Radial and Matrix-like. 120 scenes (30 per structure) were displayed to 10 subjects. For each scene, subjects had to detect a previewed photo, and to select it using the mouse. As expected, target selection times and failure numbers were influenced by task difficulty, target position and photo subject. Eye-tracking data suggest that, during the initial survey in search of the target, Elliptic layouts provided better visual comfort than any of the other layouts (shortest scan paths), and proved to be sensibly more efficient than Matrix layouts (shorter initial survey durations). All these results are significant.

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.

We present an exploratory experiment of the possible contribution of multimodal messages to facilitating visual search in complex scenes (e.g., visualizations of very large data sets). The main objective is to evaluate the actual contribution of verbal information to improving the efficiency (i.e., accuracy and speed) of the detection and selection (using the mouse) of visual targets. The evaluation focuses on the performances and subjective satisfaction of future users in three situations where the main free variable is the target's preliminary presentation: (i) display of the isolated target, (ii) verbal designation + information on its location in the scene, and (iii) multimodal (visual + oral) presentation. Multimodal target presentations improved subjects' performances significantly; they also received the highest subjective ratings.