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Interactive displays (IDs) are increasingly employed in informal learning environments, where they are seen as a medium for enhancing students’ creativity, and engagement. Due to the larger space they provide and thus the larger interaction area, they allow for group-work, working in parallel, co-creating artifacts or co-experiencing the interaction in a playful manner. In particular, gaming activities in IDs enhance students’ mental exercise and fantasy and promote students engagement through rewards and collaboration. However, despite the increased prevalence of interactive displays and gamification, we know very little about how designers and instructors can gamify their learning activities by taking advantage of the IDs. In this paper, a framework for developing gamified activities for interactive displays is presented. For the empirical evaluation, pre-post attitudinal surveys and cognitive tests along with photos and observations were recorded and used. The contribution of this article is twofold: 1) an adaptable framework for developing gamified activities on interactive displays (GAID), and 2) the results of a field study where students have been engaged with an interactive display application during an extracurricular activity. By incorporating GAID to a traditional informal learning activity, it is found that students’ knowledge acquisition, satisfaction, enjoyment and intention to participate on similar events in the future are significantly improved. © The Author(s). 2017 Open Access This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made.

Interactive displays are becoming increasingly popular in informal learning environments as an educational technology for improving students&rsquo, learning and enhancing their engagement. Interactive displays have the potential to reinforce and maintain collaboration and rich-interaction with the content in a natural and engaging manner. Despite the increased prevalence of interactive displays for learning, there is limited knowledge about how students collaborate in informal settings and how their collaboration around the interactive surfaces influences their learning and engagement. We present a dual eye-tracking study, involving 36 participants, a two-staged within-group experiment was conducted following single-group time series design, involving repeated measurement of participants&rsquo, gaze, voice, game-logs and learning gain tests. Various correlation, regression and covariance analyses employed to investigate students&rsquo, collaboration, engagement and learning gains during the activity. The results show that collaboratively, pairs who have high gaze similarity have high learning outcomes. Individually, participants spending high proportions of time in acquiring the complementary information from images and textual parts of the learning material attain high learning outcomes. Moreover, the results show that the speech could be an interesting covariate while analyzing the relation between the gaze variables and the learning gains (and task-based performance). We also show that the gaze is an effective proxy to cognitive mechanisms underlying collaboration not only in formal settings but also in informal learning scenarios.

Social Media have been gaining in popularity worldwide over the last years at an increasingly growing rate. The introduction of social media in companies enables a new method of communication among colleagues and with customers. Although social media are in the top of the agenda for many companies to date, there seems to be very limited understanding of the usage of social media for work purposes. In this study, we investigate whether employees make use of social media for work purposes, what values increase this usage, and if that usage is related with their performance. Responses from 1799 employees in the insurance industry were used to examine the impact of social media on work. Results confirmed that in the case of social media for work, employees make extended use of them no matter their age. We found also that both utilitarian and hedonic values influence employees to use more social media for their work, at least in the insurance sector. Last but not least, this study confirms that there is an important relation between the use of social media and the work performance.

In this paper, an innovative fuzzy approach for ranking alternatives in multiple attribute decision making problems based on TOPSIS is presented in-depth and studied through simulation comparison with the original method. The TOPSIS method provides the principle of compromise that the chosen alternative should have the shortest distance from the ideal solution and, simultaneously, the farthest distance from the negative ideal solution. However, the TOPSIS method does not always produce results in harmony with this principle due to an oversimplified definition of its aggregation function which does not grasp the contradictory nature of the principle's formulation. Our approach addresses this issue through the introduction of a fuzzy set representation of the closeness to the ideal and to the negative ideal solution for the definition of the aggregation function which is modeled as the membership function of the intersection of two fuzzy sets. This model enables a parameterization of the method according to the risk attitude of the decision maker. Thus, a class of methods is formulated whose different instances correspond to different risk attitudes of the decision makers. In order to define some clear advises for decision makers facilitating a proper parameterization of the method, a comparative analysis of the proposed class of methods with the original TOPSIS method is performed according to well defined simulation techniques. The results of the simulation experiment show on the one hand that there is no direct correspondence between the proposed class of methods and TOPSIS, and on the other hand that it is adequate to distinguish three instances that correspond respectively to risk-averse, risk-neutral and risk-seeking decision makers. Finally, a numerical example pertaining to the problem of service provider selection is presented to illustrate the application of the proposed class of methods and its functioning.

Co-located collaboration on large vertical screens has become technically feasible, but users are faced with increased effort, or have to wear intrusive personal identifiers. Previous research on co-located collaboration has assumed that all users perform exactly the same task (e.g., moving and resizing photos), or that they negotiate individual actions in turns. However, there is limited user interface software that supports simultaneous performance of individual actions during shared tasks (Fig. 1a). As a remedy, we have introduced multi-touch chords (Fig. 1b) and personal action windows (Fig. 1c) for co-located collaboration on a large multi-touch vertical display. Instead of selecting an item in a fixed menu by reaching for it, users work simultaneously on shared tasks by means of personal action windows, which are triggered by multi-touch chords performed anywhere on the display. In order to evaluate the proposed technique with users, we introduced an experimental task, which stands for the group dynamics that emerge during shared tasks on a large display. A grounded theory analysis of users’ behaviour provided insights into established co-located collaboration topics, such as conflict resolution strategies and space negotiation. The main contribution of this work is the design and implementation of a novel seamless identification and interaction technique that supports diverse multi-touch interactions by multiple users: multi-touch chord interaction along with personal action windows. Open Access This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made.

As computing increasingly deals with our complex daily experiences, designers are challenged with new methods and ways of implementing complex interactions in limited user space and tools, but without hindering user experience and creativity. In this paper, we present the results of an empirical investigation regarding the effect of space and tool availability on user experience and creativity. The goal is to understand whether and how space and tool availability allow users to be more creative and improve their overall experience. To do so, we developed a connect-the-dots drawing multi-user application with a focus on having certain restrictions in size and specific tool availability. Based on this application, we conducted an empirical study with 38 users. For the evaluation, surveys, photos and observations were recorded and used in our analysis. The results showed that: (a) tool availability does not affect user creativity and experience and (b) space availability affects user creativity, collaboration and hedonic motivation (pleasure). Although our results are early, provide insights that tools' limitation does not hinder users' ability to be creative; and space availability is of great importance in creative activities.

Despite the increasing use of Multi-Touch (MT) capable devices, novel interaction techniques need to be examined in order to swift from a single-touch WIMP interaction paradigm to a MT one.In this work, we focus on chord interaction on vertical MT screens. Chord is the simultaneous touch of more than one finger on the MT screen. Based on a user experiment with 12 users, we explore the positioning - interaction space of the chord technique, by investigating a relation among the type of the chord (number of fingers) and the position on the screen that the chord was applied. The empirical results have indicated an interaction pattern that demonstrates a significant relation between the type of the chord that was applied (number of fingers) and its position on the screen. Our results show that as the number of fingers needed for a chord increases, the nearer from the bottom left of the screen this chord is to be applied. Notably, our results give evidence of the fact that there is a threshold (five-finger-chord) beyond which the above relation is not strong.

With the increasing use of multi-touch (MT) capable devices, MT interaction has become a commodity during the last years. From personal devices to larger multi-user screens, MT functionality is nowadays considered as a standard way of performing rich interactions. However, moving from a single-touch interaction to a dual-touch and consequently to MT is not always without challenges for the average user. Although, the use of single-touch is very common, interaction design have yet to be examined thoroughly by taking into account potential differences of single and multi-touch functionality. In this work, we investigate the potential of a two-finger chord button in comparison to the traditional single touch buttons that we find in touchscreens. Based on the fact that users are familiar with single touch buttons (even before the MT screens) our hypotheses are: the use of a two finger chord button a) decreases users' efficiency, and b) delays users' responses. In order to investigate our hypotheses, we conducted a controlled experiment with 12 users working on an appropriately designed MT application. The empirical results have indicated that the use of two-finger button significantly delays users' response-time while it does not affect users' efficiency on the performed task.

MT (Multi-touch) screens are platforms that enhance multiuser collaboration. In this work, we underline the need for novel interaction techniques and toolkits that allow multi-user collaboration on larger MT surfaces. We present ChordiAction toolkit that makes use of a novel chorded interaction technique allowing simultaneous multi-user interaction on scalable MT applications. We describe the design, the architecture and some efficient customizations practices of the toolkit and show how it can be effectively embedded in an application for multiuser interaction. As a proof of concept, we present some example applications using ChordiAction toolkit showing its potentials and discuss our future plans for further evaluation of this technique.

In this paper, we propose a user-based video-indexing method, that automatically generates thumbnails of the most important scenes of an online video stream, by analyzing users’ interactions with a web video player. As a test bench to verify our idea we have extended the YouTube video player into the VideoSkip system. In addition, VideoSkip uses a web-database (Google Application Engine) to keep a record of some important parameters, such as the timing of basic user actions (play, pause, skip). Moreover, we implemented an algorithm that selects representative thumbnails. Finally, we populated the system with data from an experiment with nine users. We found that the VideoSkip system indexes video content by crowdsourcing implicit users interactions, such as pause and thirty seconds skip. Our early findings point toward improvements of the web video player and its thumbnail generation technique. The VideoSkip system could compliment content-based algorithms, in order to achieve efficient video-indexing in difficult videos, such as lectures or sports.

In this paper, we present a system that facilitates the analysis of user activity within a web video. Previous research in user-based techniques has assumed an extra effort from the users, such as video replies, comments, tags, and annotations. We have developed and evaluated the SocialSkip system, which improves sense making of web videos by visualizing the simplest form of user interactions with video, such as pause, and seek. In contrast to previous stand-alone implementations, the SocialSkip system employs a web-video player and cloud-based resources (application logic, database, content). The system was validated with two user studies, which provided several hundreds of user interactions with five types of web video (sports, comedy, lecture, documentary, how-to). We found that seeking activity within web video is reversely proportional to how interesting the video is. Moreover, we suggest that if the users are actively seeking for information within a video (e.g., lecture, how-to), then the user activity graph could be associated with the semantics of the video. Finally, SocialSkip provides an open architecture for collaborative contributions to the analysis of the user activity data, in a fashion similar to the TRECVID workshop series.

In this paper, we present an updated set of experimental tasks and measures for large multi-touch (MT) input devices. In addition to a multi-user condition, we have employed an updated set of tasks, as well as subjective measures for user enjoyment. In the first experiment (a target acquisition task with two moving targets), the MT was more efficient than the mouse. Surprisingly, we found that the reduced accuracy of MT did not affect the perceived usability, or the enjoyment of the users. In the second experiment (a multiple shapes docking task), the MT was again more efficient and enjoying than the mouse. In the two-user condition, we found that performance and enjoyment was always higher than the single-user conditions, regardless of input device and task. Besides the quantitative results, we observed that users employed diverse interaction strategies in the MT condition, such as bi-manual input. The proposed tasks and the results support the use of MT in entertainment applications (multimedia and video-games), collaborative work, and scientific visualizations with complex data.