Browsing by Author "Stolterman, Erik"

Now showing 1 - 3 of 3
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    Emotional communication in instant messaging
    (2015-10-29) Pirzadeh, Afarin; Bolchini, Davide; Voida, Stephen; Stolterman, Erik; Wada, Terri
    Emotional communication is fundamental to everyday interaction. How well emotions are communicated is crucial to interpersonal relationships and individual well-being. Emotional communication in instant messaging (IM), however, can be challenging because of the absence of visual and aural nonverbal behaviors. Despite the growing number of technologically-focused solutions for supporting emotional communication in IM, limited design research has been done to study the actual users’ behaviors in communicating their emotion in IM and strategies they use to adapt emotional communication in this medium, with the purpose of establishing design solutions to support users' emotional communication. Connecting several bodies of HCI, design, and communication literature in the context of IM, this dissertation critically examines how users communicate emotion in IM and accordingly establishes user-centered multi-touch gesture based design solutions to support emotional communication in this medium. Understanding how users communicate their emotion in IM, the design issues, and corresponding design solutions help researchers and designers to support the user's emotional needs, resulting in the improvement of emotional communication strategies in IM.
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    Personal Informatics and Reflection: A Critical Examination of the Nature of Reflection
    (Office of the Vice Chancellor for Research, 2013-04-05) Pirzadeh, Afarin; He, Li; Stolterman, Erik
    Personal informatics systems that help people both collect and reflect on various kinds of personal information are growing rapidly. Despite the importance of journaling and the main role it has in tracking one’s personal growth, a limited number of studies have examined journaling in the area of personal informatics in detail. In this paper, we critically examine the process of reflection on experiences, thoughts and evolving insights through a qualitative research study. We also present the design research process we conducted to develop the Wandering Mind as a support tool to help individuals record and reflect on their experiences.
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    Understanding interaction mechanics in touchless target selection
    (2016-07-28) Chattopadhyay, Debaleena; Bolchini, Davide; MacDorman, Karl F.; Voida, Stephen; Stolterman, Erik
    We use gestures frequently in daily life—to interact with people, pets, or objects. But interacting with computers using mid-air gestures continues to challenge the design of touchless systems. Traditional approaches to touchless interaction focus on exploring gesture inputs and evaluating user interfaces. I shift the focus from gesture elicitation and interface evaluation to touchless interaction mechanics. I argue for a novel approach to generate design guidelines for touchless systems: to use fundamental interaction principles, instead of a reactive adaptation to the sensing technology. In five sets of experiments, I explore visual and pseudo-haptic feedback, motor intuitiveness, handedness, and perceptual Gestalt effects. Particularly, I study the interaction mechanics in touchless target selection. To that end, I introduce two novel interaction techniques: touchless circular menus that allow command selection using directional strokes and interface topographies that use pseudo-haptic feedback to guide steering–targeting tasks. Results illuminate different facets of touchless interaction mechanics. For example, motor-intuitive touchless interactions explain how our sensorimotor abilities inform touchless interface affordances: we often make a holistic oblique gesture instead of several orthogonal hand gestures while reaching toward a distant display. Following the Gestalt theory of visual perception, we found similarity between user interface (UI) components decreased user accuracy while good continuity made users faster. Other findings include hemispheric asymmetry affecting transfer of training between dominant and nondominant hands and pseudo-haptic feedback improving touchless accuracy. The results of this dissertation contribute design guidelines for future touchless systems. Practical applications of this work include the use of touchless interaction techniques in various domains, such as entertainment, consumer appliances, surgery, patient-centric health settings, smart cities, interactive visualization, and collaboration.